Data backup is a critical task you must do if you don’t ever want your valuable files are lost or corrupted for some reasons. Imagine you have valuable wedding photo album and tons of your golden moments stored in your computer hard disk lost due to hard disk crash. You will never get those unforgettable moments replied or reproduced. In businesses, imagine thousands of critical files as the results of years of hard work of your employee lost due to disaster and you don’t have a well managed backup system, how can you recover those critical files back?

Unfortunately, not all users are aware how important data backup is. But in businesses, a well managed backup strategy must be in place as part of the business continuity and disaster recovery planning. With a well managed backup, if you ever have your files lost or corrupted or in case of disaster, you don’t need to be panic you can always restore your files back. For home users, what is the easy way to setup your environment to backup automatically? Consider to build your wireless network using Apple Time Capsule 1T or 2T storage.

With Apple Time Capsule you can build your wireless network environment with a capability of backing up your computers data automatically. You just need to backup once at the first time probably take all night long depends on how huge your data and then the system will synchronize the data only if the files changed or updated. All the backup operations from the computers (Macs or PCs) are performed automatically either via wired or wireless connection of your network.

Time Capsule is basically a full featured Airport Extreme Base Station. The device is powered with the latest 802.11n technology to provide high-speed wireless network and backup system for all your Mac computers and PCs – all in one device. The device supports the dual-band wireless n technology to support all the Wi-Fi devices that use either 2.4GHz or 5GHz frequency bands including Mac computers, PCs, iPhone, iPod touch, and Apple TVs.

Remote Access

With Time Capsule you can access your data via the internet wherever you go. If your computer is Mac OS X Leopard or Snow Leopard, you can be a member of MobileMe. With MobileMe, you can register your Time Capsule with your MobileMe account and the drive will appear in your Mac Finder sidebar and you can access the drive when you are on the go from everywhere as if you have a personal file server wherever you go.

USB Port

The Time Capsule includes one USB port you can use to share a printer accessible across the network. You can also add a USB hub to allow you share the printer and add more external drive at the same time. So you don’t need to buy separate print-server device.

Guest Secure Access

If you would like to share the internet access with your guests, you can create Guest secure access without compromising your private network resources such as your attached storage. Use the included Airport utility and create a separate Wi-Fi network for your guests with different password or even with no password.

Time Capsule T1 or T2 is ideal solution for home wireless network that support the automatic backup over the wireless network. For small to medium businesses, Time Capsule might not be a good solution. In small to medium businesses with Windows server 2003 or later you can configure the Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS). One of the advantages of the VSS in windows server 2003 or later is the capability of restoring the previous versions of the files. In businesses, it is frequently happened that people accidently overwrite the original document files while updating the files that supposed to be saved as to different file names. With VSS support, you can restore the previous versions of your document files.

VSS is not the solution for your complete backup strategy for businesses but it helps you restore your files easily in some situations. You still need a well managed backup strategy including the backup device and software as part of your business continuity and disaster recovery planning.

By Ki Grinsing

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