Time Capsule Quirks

“John”:http://www.theludwigs.com has been having some trouble with his Time Capsule. The two I have have been working great with the exception that backups don’t seem to start properly (may be related to passwords), but there is lots of “folklore”:http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/timecapsule/ about how to deal with Time Machine and also a very active http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=1253

* If you update to 7.3.1, folks are seeing “dropped wifi connections”:http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1455021&tstart=75 and so the solution is to rollback to 7.
* Be careful about updating to TimeCapsule firmware 7.3.1, there have been many “reports”:http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1457671&tstart=0 of issues with it. Of course I did by taking the autoupdate, so woe to me. No problems yet though, but we don’t push our network hard. Many folks are “reverting”:http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1450037&tstart=30 to 7.3. Most of the problems seem to be TimeCapsule goes into an infinite ooop resetting the password. To get back goto Airport Utility/Base Station/Upload Firmware and look for 7.3
* Time Capsule is a router, so to really make it work, you have to disable the router part of it. Some folks report that doesn’t work. Ours at work seems to work fine as just a wireless access point
* Computer names and the Time Capsule name have to be 8-11 characters (reports vary) and no special characters like the apostrophe which is the default in computer names (Rich’s MacBook Air). This would require changing every Mac name to look like a DOS name (ugh, back to richmacair). With the Time Machine in the first version this seemed to be a problem, but right now it seems to work with “normal readable names” so i don’t know
* Make the Time Capsule’s Airdisk password the same as the admin password of the Time Capsule. Hmm. I did this by accident, but it is the advice of many on Apple forums. Don’t know if this is folklore or not
* If you have Symantec Antivirus, disable the autoprotect feature, otherwise it is very, very slow as it checks everything on the way to the Time Capsule during backup. Folks have reported 10x increases in speed.
* Laptops won’t backup unless they are connected to power, that’s a robustness feature
* If you have a Canon Pro9000, you have to use the generic Canon IJ driver and not the dedicated Pro9000 driver.

I’m Rich & Co.

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