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Can anyone recommend a suitable hard disc for backing up the files my Mac. The Apple time capsules are £200 odd. I presume there's something a bit cheaper than that that would do the job just as well?
Time machine, and any external disk, ideally on your home network if you have one, but a standalone external drive can be used.
Any brand, or do they vary in quality? I'd look on Amazon by default unless there are better places to get one from.
£200 for an external disk drive?
i am using some cheap hard-drive i got a PC world to back up the SOs laptop. The only downside is that it isn't wireless so i have to plug it in once in a while.
I've got a 1TB iomega that I use- only downside is that it's big, noisy and needs it's own power socket. If buying now, I'd get something like a Western Digital Passport which is small, light and quiet, and gets it's power from the usb socket- it's less annoying keeping it plugged in all the time so Time Machine can access it when it wants.
The point of a time capsule is backing up over wifi, instead of having a house brick plugged in all the time.
You can use any NAS drive & a wifi router, but they might not play with time machine.
Time capsule is also a wifi router. Western Digital do Mac edition HDs, fire wire if you want to use that.
I have the 750gb version of this one
http://store.apple.com/uk/product/TS585ZM/A?fnode=MTY1NDA0Nw&mco=ODE0Mjk0Nw
it can be noisy but small price to pay, firewire connection and it works as a usb hub too.
The most important question is surely, "does any one make an alternative that looks ac cool?"
I used the instructions in the pdf downloadable from [url= http://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=13522-40 ]here[/url]
Works fine over wireless and most of the instructions aren't qnap specific. Key step is to enable unsupported volumes in timemachine.
[code]defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1[/code]
In theory that should allow any share to act as a timemachine volume.