Airport TimeCapsule and iPad

[MorrisTheCat]

Hi folks. I have had a good search through past posts but I've not found a definitive answer. My question is can I possibly Backup my iPad (and even iPhone) to the 3TB HDD in the Time capsule over WiFi? For some reason when I did research about just what the Time Capsule is the indication this was the concept presented on the Apple Webpage that any Apple device with WiFi was capable. Even the counter gal at the Apple Store said it would! Now it's been a few months and my new 128GB iPad 4 can only access the Internet through the Time Capsule but that is all. (Kind of pointless when its already working well through the VDSL modem perfectly). I have tried all kinds of things but NOTHING is resolved. The only thing that seems to work is my MacBook Pro backing up to the Capsule which means a teeny tiny amount f space on that 3TB is being used. Am I right understanding that Apple would prefer me to stump up more $ in an ongoing basis and back up to their Cloud instead and that basically my buying a Time Capsule was a dumb move?

 

[twerppoet]

If you are backing up your iPad to the MacBook Pro in iTunes, then in a round about way your are backing it up to the TimeCapsule as well. Or should I say, you are backing up the iPad backup using TimeMachine pointed at the Time Capsule.

The weakness, of course, is that if both the MacBook Pro and the iPad go bad, there is no way of restoring the iPad from that backup until you first restore the MacBook Pro.

To the best of my knowledge there is no way to 'directly' backup the iPad to your Time Capsule. It wasn't designed to work with iOS, and so far Apple has done little to change that. It is however a fairly obvious thing for them to do, and they will probably do it some day. It is probably not high on their list of priorities though, since it only affects a fairly small portion of iOS owners. Little comfort, I know.

In the mean time I recommend you force an occasional iCloud backup to supplement your iTunes backup. Maybe set up a reoccurring reminder to do it once a week? This is what I do, only the other way around. I use iCloud as my primary backup and force an occasional iTunes backup for redundancy, and since that backup gets backed up by Time Machine, I also have a history of backups to draw upon.

 

[MorrisTheCat]

Excellent info and advice as always. Much appreciated. Makes my somewhat expensive investment into a Time Capsule a bit of a waste of money if all it's doing is covering the MacBook Pro and currently making very little use of the space on the 3TB HDD. I know I could make a LAN (but already have a cabled one through the modem router to my PC whole my MacBook Pro is currently WiFi only....

I've not really taken on the idea that the iCloud is what I need

 

[MorrisTheCat]

Excellent info and advice as always. Much appreciated. Makes my somewhat expensive investment into a Time Capsule a bit of a waste of money if all it's doing is covering the MacBook Pro and currently making very little use of the space on the 3TB HDD. I know I could make a LAN (but already have a cabled one through the modem router to my PC whole my MacBook Pro is currently WiFi only....

I've not really taken on the idea that the iCloud is what I need

.... Simply because I don't like the idea of having to keep paying for something, the access can sometimes be really bad here in New Zealand due to terrible data rates that can slow to crawl and that I just don't like the idea of having the only copy of valuable personal info in someone else's "care".

I'll have to look around the Hacking community to see if anyone has come up with some tricks to make use of what is a great bit of hardware.

 

[twerppoet]

Well, no backups, but I understand there are ways to use your Time Capsule as a NAS (Network Attached Storage), and play music, movies, etc. off the drive. There are at least a couple threads on the forum on the subject.