LETTER OF THE MONTH

Dropping Time Capsule is the greatest disservice that Apple has ever perpetrated towards its customers. My home has multiple laptops with teenagers that can’t be nudged, cajoled, prodded, or in any way compelled to connect to a hard drive to run a Time Machine backup. Having a solution that worked in the background gave me peace of mind that data was routinely backed up and that machines could be easily restored if required. In addition to Time Machine we were already using Backblaze as a redundant resource.

Your cover story “Backup Your Mac” (Issue 153) makes it apparent that now we have to hunt for a router and a NAS that are compatible with Time Machine. An earlier issue (Issue 150) described the complexity of configuring a NAS for Time Machine. Now it’s up to the user to hunt through Support message boards trying to determine the settings for routers and NAS to make this all work.

This is an awful situation and Mac|Life should be calling Apple out for dropping this, and other vendors for not offering a one–step solution. Seth Hulkower

Time Capsule was certainly an excellent fit–and–forget solution to automating on–site backups (though not without its foibles, we would add), and Apple’s recommendation of attaching a drive directly to a Mac isn’t a workable alternative. But as for a network Time machine drive — it should be fairly straightforward to use once you’ve gone through the admittedly tricky setup, with greater options for flexibility, and greater reliability, than Time Capsule could ever offer. We’re glad to see you using Backblaze as an off–site backup option, though, as iCloud is not recommended for this task.