Apple Backup Drive

If you are a Mac user, then you’ve already heard about Time Machine and other backup software products, however you need some place to store those backups, online or offline. Having a backup drive can be the less expensive way to keep backups on the long run, since even though it will cost you quite a bit more than an online backup service, it’s a one time payment as you’ll own the hardware, instead of having to pay a monthly fee for as long as you want your backups to be stored.

Almost any external hard disk drive can be used as a backup drive by most of Mac’s supported backup tools, although some of them will work better than others.

We’ll start by talking about Western Digital’s Dual Option Backup External Drive, which will hold up to 160 Gb of data and can be connected to your Mac through it’s high speed USB interface or through FireWire which in some cases achieves better speeds than USB.

The second option is a Western Digital My Book drive which holds up to 500 Gb of data connected to an Airport Extreme Base Station, so that it can be accessed through your wireless network. The main advantage of doing it this way is that you can back up more than one computer to a single drive without having to connect it to each computer to back it up individually. The drawback is that wireless transfers are slower than high speed USB or Firewire, so if you’re backing up only one Mac it doesn’t make any sense to set it up this way.

This list wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t mention Apple’s Time Capsule which is an external hard drive that has an integrated 802.11n access point so it can be accessed via your wireless network and can backup several Macs at once. It doesn’t stop there, the Time Capsule has an integrated USB port that can be used to hook up a printer and use it as a network print server, allowing you to print from both, Windows and Mac computers effortlessly. The Time Capsule also has dual band capacity, which means that it will accept wireless connections on channels of both, the 2.4 Ghz and the 5 Ghz bands. As if this wasn’t enough, the Time Capsule can also set a “secondary wireless network” so that you can share your Internet access without providing access to your “private” network, which is used to communicate with the Time Capsule.