These days you can never have enough storage.  Everything we have seems to consume large amounts of space on our computers and therefore it is essential that we have lots of storage.  This Western Digital My Passport pocket hard drive does the job for me.

For a while now I have backed everything up to my Apple Time Capsule (500Gb) which has worked really well. However I have always thought that I should really have an off-site backup. I mean what if the worse was to happen and the house burnt down I would of course loose my computer, but I would always have the backup?  Wrong as the backup is also in my house.

This is the reason that I carry around this little 320Gb pocket drive to keep a reasonably up-to-date version of my files on so that I always have a couple of backups to fall back on.

Having had my new MacBook Pro for a few weeks now I decided that it was time to seriously start thinking about regular and reliable backups in order to prevent problems if a failure or error on my part should occur.  It has happened to me before and it is not good.  Therefore I invested in a Time Capsule from Apple to wirelessly backup my MacBook and provide wireless access to the Internet.  He is how I set things up.

First of all let me say this.  Finding out how to set up the Time Capsule pre-sale was a little difficult.  You see for some reason the Time Capsule is exactly like a ‘normal’ wireless modem router only it doesn’t have a modem inside.  Therefore by itself it cannot connect directly to the Internet.  In order to connect it to the net you need to have a modem.  Of course I have a modem but it is not a dedicated modem, it comes in the form of a Belkin wireless modem router and I was having great difficulty in finding out from Apple, or anywhere else on the web for that matter whether it would work.

Well I can safely say that it does work.  The setup that I am currently using you can see in the diagram above.  So what I have is my original Belkin Wireless modem router plugged into the phone socket, accessing the Internet from Tiscali.  Then out of the 4 Ethernet ports at the back I have my Ethernet wires going around the house, when I completed my home networking, one of which is plugged into the time capsules Ethernet WAN port, which provides the Time Capsule with the Internet.  In the setup I have to use ‘Bridge Mode’ on the Time Capsule in order to get it working.  Then I setup a wireless network from the Time Capsule following the very simple steps in the Airport Utility that is already on your Mac (Leopard needed although the disc does come with the Time Capsule).

All my devices no connect to the Time Capsule which shares or routes the Internet to each device.  Also the Time Capsules built in 500Gb hard drive shows up as a network drive and so I have using that as my Time Machine drive when backing up all my Mac.  As usual a cracking piece of kit from Apple and very easy to setup.  Highly recommended.

Last night I had disappointing news.  I use an external 250Gb drive with Time Machine in order to backup my data on my Mac Mini, however this backup drive failed.  Therefore I was on the hunt for a replacement.

Having started a time machine backup as normal I started to hear some very strange noises from the external disk enclosure which houses the drive.  Remembering from a couple of weeks ago when a colleagues drive failed and the technician had a screwdriver to it listening for problems, this did not sound good.  I pulled the dirve out and tried it in several machines and it was clear that is was dead.  Bad news.

Therefore I went on the hunt for a new drive.  I thought that I would future proof it and purchase a portable drive (my next computer purchase will be a MacBook) and settled on a Western Digital My Passport 320gb drive from PC World (I know but it was the cheapest!).

However once I collected the drive all was not as easy as I thought.  The only hurdle that I fell into was actually getting through the packaging and into the drive.  I could not seperate it and therefore decided to cut through the packaging with scissors.  As you can see the scissors came off worse.  Those scissors have lasted since I was about 13 – gutted!

The drive seems fine.  Powered from the USB port it has now backed up my entire system (65Gb), although Time Machine needed to reformat it.  Presumably it was PC formatted.