Any computer user worth their salt will stress the importance of data backup. Too many people either don’t think about it or put it off into the “someday” category, leaving open the possibility that you’ll get burned. Anybody, though, who has been caught with a hosed system and inadequate backups realizes the cold, hard importance of it.

So, it is a given you need to back up your data. The question is: how?

Continued

As I have briefly mentioned in my previous posts, for my day job I am the primary technical resource for a small business and as a “side gig” I manage web servers for hosting companies. One of the great benefits to this is I have become quite adept at developing command line scripts, or “batch” scripts.

One of the most common, and well suited, applications for a command line script is data backup. Command line scripts can be automated to run at any time without any human interaction and are only limited by… well, nothing. Continued

If you run a lot of Windows scheduled tasks, particularly on a server, it is very worthwhile to have a local account dedicated to nothing but this. The reasons being:

• If you run the task as a normal user account and that user happens to be logged when the task starts, the process runs in the current user’s session. If the user logs out while the task is running, the task quits and doesn’t complete.
• Changing an account password doesn’t effect the scheduled task account at all.

When you create a scheduled task account, it is best to assign it a long random password since you will not be using it hardly and to lock down the permissions as much as possible. For example, you would probably want to eliminate remote login for this account or just give it “Backup Operator” permissions.

I’m going to say first that Apple’s Time Capsule - even never having used it - is a good product for the fact it’s easy and it’s got a crapload of space for backing up your stuff. A problem that has plagued computer users for years is that there’s really been no easy backup solution, but Time Capsule truly does make it easy.

I personally couldn’t care less if what’s in it is considered "server grade" or not. The fact it’s simple is in itself the main selling point.

However..

Apple has stated - quite directly - that the hard drive in it is "server grade".

Server grade, for all intents and purposes, means "not consumer grade". It should be a hard drive that is used in server-specific applications that can take a pounding.

As it turns out, the Time Capsule absolutely does not have a server grade hard drive in it.

What hard drive does it use? Hitachi Deskstar. Very off-the-shelf. Very consumer grade. Big and huge, yes, but still nowhere near server-grade HDD specs.

So anyway, the big deal is that Apple states Time Capsule has a server grade HDD when in fact it doesn’t.. unless Apple thinks "server grade" means "a big honkin’ hard drive". The term is relative. But as anyone knows, "big" doesn’t translate to "server grade" - at all.

Will this hurt sales?

I doubt it.

It’s still the easiest consumer backup solution there is.

Just as a quick comparison:

If you bought just a 1TB Hitachi Deskstar HDD alone, the highest price is $319.00.

The Time Capsule 1TB version is $499.00.

If you have a Mac Pro, buying the drive outright and using Time Machine is the better option. You save $180 and it’s faster (no wi-fi lag).

If you have an iMac and/or Macbook Air/Pro, Time Capsule is the better option because of the wi-fi and the fact you can’t add hard drives in those applications, so you have to have an external solution of some kind. Time Capsule is it, no question.

And if anyone’s wondering why I put "duh" in the title of this post, the moment I saw Time Capsule I knew from the get-go it’s not server grade. I mean, c’mon, seriously.. is a little white pretty slab supposed to have the same ability as Xserve? OF COURSE NOT.