Yesterday we got the awesome surprise of having our Time Capsule delivered early. I was able to take photos of the unboxing due to an unexpected (but fun) trip to PolyVector’s parents’ for dinner. We stayed up late getting the Time Capsule all setup and working. I was so excited that my photos are not the best they could have been. but they give you a pretty good overview of the Time Capsule and how we fit it into our network.

I am not going to give this product a review just yet. I feel that networking equipment especially need at least a good month of real use before telling how the product is really going to handle. Since Polyvector and I heavily rely on our home network I think we’ll be able to give it a good test. We constantly stream and backup over both wifi and ethernet.

Initial setup was quite easy, but very different than what we are normally use to. Apple has taken a webless interface approach to the Airport Extreme and of course this applies to the Time Capsule. As a Mac user, you simply go to your Utilities folder in Applications and run Airport Utility. This will scour the network for any Airport Extremes, Airport Express, or Time Capsules you might have and displays them in a nice little application.

This is the first router we have ever purchased from Apple and we actually had a few doubts about how well we could customize our network. We were pleasantly surprised at the options the Time Capsule (or Airport Extreme) offered. We were able to setup our closed wifi network using 5GHz 802.11n and there are even options for static DHCP, which is extremely useful on our network since we stream lots of media and run various local servers that require connection by IP rather than a network name (such as iMac.local). The only thing the Time Capsule/Airport Extremem cannot do is Access Restrictions for domains. We used to block the Google Adsense and Analytics servers using our routers so we would never click on our own ads by accident or be logged as a statistic on our own sites. However this isn’t a must have feature for a router as you can get various tools to do it at the browser level (most people do it this way anyways)

As for Time Machine setup. I don’t think there could have been an easier process. I mean this was created for Apple’s new backup system built into Leopard. And I gotta say it does the job wonderfully..

All you need to do to get this baby going is open up the Time Machine preferences in non other than System Preferences, turn it on and choose the “Data” folder on the Time Capsule. I am not going to go through the whole setup process right now as it really is extremely simple. I will say on your first backup to the Time Capsule there is a Finder transfer window that opens up and will remain for the entire time the backup goes. This is a one time window and all other backups after will not have this. I just thought I would say it now before anyone gets mad at their new backup system.

I think that’s it for now folks. I will field any questions you might have in the comments. And indeed we are backing up two Macs onto one Time Capsule and each gets their own special folder, so no backups will conflict with another.

Hope those who read this enjoyed it.