Well, that’s only part of a long techno-story developing on my desk. But it’s true. I raved about the Time Capsule in one of my last Ipswitch blog posts, and now I actually own one. It delivers on all its cool features, at least the ones I’ve tried (haven’t upgraded to Leopard yet) but it also runs disturbingly hot. I could have bought a USB coffee warmer for about $5 but instead I got an excellent access point and print sharing thingy. That also keeps my coffee warm. Viva Magnifica!

What’s more interesting, at least to the techie in me, is that I had a near-total hard drive failure on my iMac, and despite some inconvenience and expense, I lost very little data. And that was before I bought the Time Capsule.

Emails? Stored online with my email provider. Music? Stored on the ipod. Pictures? Well, that’s the weak link – some on flickr, some on CD, many on this blog, but a lot were on the drive. Documents? Those I actually backed up to a separate computer. So why buy a backup device like the Time Capsule? Because the drives used by those online providers are no better than the one I just bought, that’s why. Online backup is attractive too, since theft or disaster could wipe out both computer and backup, but the magnitude of media – photos and music (I don’t have many videos) – seems to make that impractical.