[l008com]

I'm an independent consultant and I'm having a problem. Every Time Capsule I've ever set up, which at this point is i think 3, fails after 3-6 months. Like clockwork, they become totally unresponsive. I end up having to do a full reset, format the disk, and start all backups from scratch. I've have very good luck using time machine via directly connected hard drive, and over a network to a file server. But these time capsules seem to be very unreliable.

Currently, one of these time capsules is in it's malfunctioning state. None of the Macs on the network can connect to it to back up. When you try to connect to the time capsule through the finder, it actually says it can't support any more users. But there are no users connected. None of the machines can connect. When you do a soft reset, it will work again, for about a day.

Has anyone else been having these issues? Anyone know a way to make these things.... reliable?? I'm getting to the point where I'm going to start setting up a hard drive on one computer on a network, and have all the machine backup to that machine's drive, rather than use a time capsule.

[msuper69]

Well that's not normal behaviour.

I've been using the 1GB TC since it came out and it's been working nearly flawlessly.
I'll occasionally have a connection problem as you describe and have to restart it using the Airport Utility. But nothing like you describe.

You can archive the existing backups to an external USB drive before doing the nuclear reset, assuming you can get connectivity via Airport Utility.

So I've set up 1 TC with no problems and you've set up 3 TC all with problems. Logically that tells me you're doing something wrong when you set them up or something is wrong with the networking environment but I've no clue what that might be.

[Andrew Stephens]

Some things just seem to radiate robustness. Time capsules are not one of those things. I find Time Machine to be generally very good using an external drive, however it's performance over wireless using a TC always seems flimsy to me.

I have set up many of these in customers houses. The hardware looks first rate, very swish. The set up is pretty well idiot proof so I can't see how the OP would be doing anything wrong.

I have had a few glitches. Some customers have had trouble doing the initial backup over wireless. I know Apple recommend the first backup be done using ethernet but hey, it's not a good start to be telling customers their new toy may have performance "issues".

Some customers have reported having to restart their TC's but none have actually had to restart backing up from one.

My one customer who really needed the system when his HD failed in mid book writing found that while we got it all back together it was not a seamless operation. The Mac with its new drive refused to see the TM backup and we had to search the internet and go through a whole load of steps before it would see it as a restorable backup, which then took several days to restore.

Still at least it worked.

Anyway, for me TM via TC is around 7/10 while its 9.5/10 using an external.

[indigoimac]

It's limited by ram and cpu power -- end of story -- afs or afp whatever it is called plus smb and whatever else it is running is simply too much. All lower-end nas devices suffer the exact same issues. I've got time machine connected to a usb2 drive shared on a powerbook g4 w. gigabit ethernet and have had no performance issues at all. Plenty of ram and cpu power for all the file sharing services.

And as for wireless you get what you get since that is a bottleneck

[l008com]

My personal backup system is over a network to a G4 tower, and I have no issues at all (well lately I have an issue, Bonjour seems to be dead on the server so time machine can't find the server). I guess the only solution is for me to go back to this customer, and every customer, and just keep resetting the capsules.