I have had a 1TB Time Capsule since June, and it works pretty well for me. I haven't had to use it to restore my MacBook, but I have used it a couple of times to rescue a file I had mistakenly deleted or otherwise messed up. I set it up to operate with user accounts for each member of my family, which gives us each a private network disk and a common one. This gives us an easy way to transfer files between computers and keeps my Time Machine backup image more secure.
I am still concerned about how good it is as a backup solution though, so I regularly clone my hard drive to an external disk. Also, I recently had an issue where the Time Machine backup failed because it couldn't mount the backup disk image. I blame this on our microwave, which sometimes interrupts the wireless network and probably did so at a critical point in an hourly backup. I was able to repair the disk image with Disk Utility (which took a while) and then spotlight had to re-index the disk image at the next incremental backup (which also took a while), but Time Machine has again worked properly ever since. I wanted something like a Time Capsule because I didn't want to have an external drive plugged into my laptop semi-permanently. I got the Time Capsule with built-in storage because I didn't want to have to deal with an extra set of cords and I didn't want to have to worry about whether an external USB disk would wake and sleep correctly. From what I've read though, an Airport Extreme with a good external drive works as well as a Time Capsule and has the advantage of the drive being swappable if the Airport should fail. If I had a desktop capable of running Leopard, I would definitely use an attached drive or spare internal drive for my Time Machine disk.
I'm thinking about moving from 802.11G to 802.11N, I have a Mac and am wondering if getting an Airport Express with or without disk drives would be a good thing. I have a home NAS that has gigabit ethernet, of course the DSL isn't close to that so internet access would still be slow. Are the drives with the airport now a reasonable back-up strategy? (initially wired, once backed up that would happen via wireless at least occasionally)
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