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May 13, 2007

Airport Extreme, Super Duper, And A Good Night's Sleep

Last month, I upgraded the 'ol home WiFi network to the (allegedly) so-fast-it-hurts 802.11n standard, courtesy Apple's new Airport Extreme base station. I went with the Extreme for a lot of reasons - the speed was attractive, of course, as was my ability to collapse a bunch of older, loose pieces of Linksys network equipment (some of which was left over from my Vonage adventure) into one compact, gleaming, glowing chunk of Apple tech.

But the big reason I went with the Extreme was for its ability to share a hard drive across a network.

See, I'm a bit fanatical about backing up. Ever since my old PowerBook threw a drive in Orlando last July I've become that guy who backs up early and often. My usual routine involves a good, weekly dump to an external disk using SuperDuper!. Saturday morning rolls around, I plug in the drive, and then I'm off running errands for a few hours.

But I do a lot of work on my computer, and weekly really isn't good enough. The thought of losing my machine on a Friday night - and wiping out a week's worth of work - has been nagging me, and I've wrestled with good ways of solving the problem. SuperDuper will allow for regularly-scheduled backups (e.g., "please back up my machine every night at 9:30 PM"), which is great, except that at any given moment in time during the day, my MacBook is as likely to be on my lap as it is on my desk. And if I'm not at the desk, I'm not next to my backup drive ... and so the backup doesn't get done.

(This problem is going to get even worse when Time Machine comes out, as it creates a continuous backup of your machine, saving copies as you modify individual files or resources.)

So. Backing up more frequently is a really, really good idea, but to make it practical I needed a centralized data store, accessible over the wireless network.

Enter Airport Extreme.

Seriously, the Extreme is fantastic. I just plugged my external, 500-GB USB drive into the base station, turned on sharing in the Airport Utility, and - bingo! - the drive is available on my network. Mac OS X mounts the drive when I sign in to my home network; the network volume works just like you'd expect it to. (Which means that when I'm on free coffee shop WiFi, there's no network volume, but when I come home the thing mounts automagically.)

Performance isn't bad, but it's not as speedy as advertised. 802.11n, like 802.11b or g has two speeds: the "theoretical" transfer limit and the "real world" performance. Theoretically, 802.11n can deliver speeds up to 600Mbit/second. In the real world, transferring a 1.02gb QuickTime file took me a little less than 10 minutes in one test, and a little more than 15 in another - or 13Mbit/sec and 8 Mbit/sec, respectively. (I'm doing some tweaks to see about boosting this.)

But truthfully, the performance is acceptable, and the peace of mind from having a reliably-backed-up MacBook is well worth the expense. When Leopard comes out, I fully expect to point it at my network volume, and let OS X simply park my changed files on the backup store. And, of course, there's a lot of flexibility, too - if I need more storage space or a greater degree of robustness, I can swap out the standalone 500-gig disk for a multi-drive RAID array.

Peace of mind is wonderful.

(PS To My Fellow Computer Users Who Don't Back Up Regularly - as one who has lost more than one drive to the Angry Gods of Data Loss, please believe me when I say that you will curse the universe when your hard drive sloughs off this mortal coil. Back up, back up, back up. Unless you can afford to lose all your photos, music, e-mail and so on ... in which case, what are you using your computer for, anyhow?)

Posted by Gavin Shearer at May 13, 2007 2:48 PM. Posted to Apple | Geek.

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