Customer Reviews and Ratings

3.0 out of 5 stars

Based on 90 reviews

  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Great Product...

    • Written by from Gram

    It is working smoothly now after 3 years, and I can say all my family are very statisfied, so I don't understand all the negative response….

    5 of 5 people found this useful

  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Happy thus far

    • Written by from Weybridge

    Bought the 2TB to replace my WD 1TB which have given up the ghost and I must say has lived up to expectations.

    Installation was simple, straight forward even with bridged to current Sky router. All very smooth and up in running in minutes. Switched over all other WiFi devices to new Time Capsule and all is very well.

    Seems to have solved issues I was having with Sky WiFi as well which is a bonus indeed!

    4 of 4 people found this useful

  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Absolute nightmare to set up

    • Written by from London

    I am fairly experienced in IT and the setup of this was a nightmare, I received lots of error messages upon set up and had to spend a fair amount of time searching the internet for help. This is not the 'apple' experience you would expect.

    10 of 23 people found this useful

  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Great product while it lasts......

    • Written by from cheltenham

    After being easy to setup and quietly backing up photos wirelessly for 18 months my 2TB Time Capsule (cost £249) failed yesterday, with a maximum of only 639GB of space ever having been used :(

    The only hint I had that something might be amiss was a 'parse bundle could not be found' message appeared on my iMac screen. The light on the time capsule changed to amber and in a trice the light went out. Since then nothing, it's completely dead.

    Bought from John Lewis in July 2011 but whereas I thought it had a 2 year guarantee I was told it was just one year.

    I would recommend anyone thinking of buying a time capsule to Google it beforehand! Not to just rely on this site, Which and Amazon, as I did. It seems there are sites where a fair number of users indicate it has an average life span of between 18-22 months.

    Such a disappointment for what was and still looks like a brilliant product; plus at the time I could have purchased a 1TB one for less money but bought the bigger one because I thought it would be more economical in the long run...... I was expecting 4-5 years akin to my Western Digital passport. And yes, I know things will fail but I honestly hadn't expected such a comparatively short time frame.

    7 of 11 people found this useful

  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    1 Week in can't fault it

    • Written by from Norwich

    Obviously my opinion may change but one week in I really can't fault the Time Capsule. I got a reconditioned 2TB model. Out of the box I simply plugged it into my existing router with a ethernet cable and turned the power on. I didn't have to fiddle around with loads of complicated settings the Time Capsule did it all itself! The dual band wifi is so clever also, My MBPRetina, iPhones and AppleTV running on one band and my housemates computers running on another. No lag at all.

    Can't fault it.

  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Excellent

    • Written by from Leighton Buzzard

    Been running this for a year with lots of success and no problems!

    Doubles up as additional WiFi so my iDevices use the Time capsule on 5GHz and other devices use the traditional WiFi at 2.4GHz. Back-ups are great and reliable, also important family pics are backed up on iCloud.
    The file storage is also great for storing backups from additional non-apple OS's , and digital media within the household.

    1 of 1 people found this useful

  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Great Stuff

    • Written by from warrington

    Fantastic! definitely buy one of these things if you wish to speed up your Internet or to back up a mac and to share hard drives. Great Product

  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    Not the usual Apple slickness

    • Written by

    Initially I connected this to my existing wireless router by ethernet, and used it in bridge mode with all the wifi transmitter off. This worked for a couple of days, but then had intermittent problems with the network disk not showing up on computers. The only way I could get it to work reliably was to use it as the wireless access point as well, and disable wifi on my existing router. Which is fine, except if the Time Capsule fails I will lose wifi connectivity as well. And on principle, it is supposed to work both ways.

    Connecting a USB disk into it and sharing it is temporamental (could be the USB disk to be fair, but had no problems connected directly to the computer.)

    The Airport Utility has some quirks - I have found certain settings only stick if you change them in a certain order.

    If when you format a disk, you change the volume name to something other than the default "data", it has a nasty habit of reverting the name back to "data" again unexpectedly. This means the computers then have to be pointed to a different backup volume.

    These kinds of issues I expect from cheaper brands. The device essentially works, but paying premium prices for Apple brand, I expect a more polished product.

    4 of 4 people found this useful

  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    The new one is fine

    • Written by from Milton Keynes

    Yes the old tc's did have the dying problem but they have fixed that on the new one it is great. I run mine 24/7 and its been running for 2 1/2 years if you have an old one before it dies what you need to do is buy an apple AirPort Extreme and then buy either a 3TB or a 2TB hard drive connect it to the extreme through the USB and you will have it just like the tc only it will work forever and it will work with time machine and it will be just like a tc and back up wirelessly

    20 of 21 people found this useful

  • 4.0 out of 5 stars

    TC 500 MB 1st gen

    • Written by from Basingstoke

    My 1st generation 500GB TC worked flawlessly until the power supply died in just under 3 years (24/7 operation). I always keep one backup of a backup so when it died I wasn't left without my data. Apple replaced it for free due to extended warranty on the product (no apple care in place). 1.5 year later the replacement still works. Good value for money.

    Always back up your TC to another external Hard disk!!!!
    (once a month)

    Apple also replaced my 80GB hard disk in a MB AIr from 2008 (free). This happened a few days before the TC died. I did upgrade to a new 2012 version recently.

    I will probably keep on buying Apple kit as long as Apple looks after their customers.If the repair costs stack up then I will probably go back to cheaper products because cheap can replaced with cheap

    17 of 20 people found this useful

  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Excellent

    • Written by from wigan

    I was a little frightened to plug the TC in after reading some of the dire reviews it received, but within 5 minutes of doing so I'd started a full (and quick) back-up of my new iMac, whilst solving a wi-fi access problem for my daughter by transforming a previously 'dead-zone' in the house with a new and improved access network... it can't be this simple, can it?

    30 of 31 people found this useful

  • 3.0 out of 5 stars

    Time Capsule

    • Written by from Great Bookham

    I too bought a Time Machine three years ago and it worked perfectly till yesterday when it just died. No power. I will have to get a new one and hope the Apple Store can retrieve the stored info. off the old one. It does get expensive if they have a problem of just dying every three years. Lets hope this problem has been fixed with the newer models

    29 of 35 people found this useful

  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Time Capsule 500GB Series 1

    • Written by from Romford

    The Time Capsule has worked faultlessly until today (16th January 2013), the unit is now dead. I bought this when it first came out (series 1) and it has been going 24 hours a day for years, backing up our ambulance computers. This is the first time it has failed and has been caused by the internal power supply failure, as per some of the reviews. Rather than fault-finding I have decided to buy a series 4 (2TB) and see how this works.

    Other than the recent failure, it has been excellent.

    21 of 26 people found this useful

  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Actually get advertised speeds from VM now!

    • Written by from crawley

    Was previously using vm's superhub which only works on single band 2.4 ghz or 5ghz which meant because I have nintendo products in the house had to choose 2.4 and my wireless speeds were top 70mbs down normally much less (like 30mbs down) , now my download speed is 100mbs down pretty constant on the macbook pro . Time machine backups every hour is great as well because I cant be bothered to keep finding a usb external hard drive every week or so.

    9 of 10 people found this useful

  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    A sad sad day..

    • Written by from ROMFORD

    I read the reviews. I made the decision and purchased a Time Capsule. Everything worked perfectly, just like the all the product literature says. Then, today for no reason, it has turned itself off and will not turn on. The, by now, well documented fault I ignored when I bought it has come along. I'm so extremely disappointed.
    The biggest problem with this is it works SO well that you're fooled into a false sense of security, then BANG! You're left with a nice looking plastic box...
    BAD APPLE!

    76 of 89 people found this useful

  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Time Machine 2 years old

    • Written by from Norwich

    I've waited 2 years to leave my comments as there seems to be an issue with this unit.

    I must say mine has been perfect apart from a few times whist backing up the power on my MacBook Pro or iMac was turned off, this corrupted the back ups and the whole back up needed to be restarted.

    WIFI range massively improved nearly a full signal all over the house and a little in the Garden. We have a 6 bed, so quite large. The speed is noticeable fast as well (tested via speediest.net).

    Easy to set up and you don't even notice is working in the background.

    All in all an awesome product and i recommend this to anybody.

    30 of 32 people found this useful

  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Amazing Product

    • Written by from Redditch

    Despite all the bad reviews, I purchased this product and I am not disappointed, this product is amazing - from all aspects.

    Its quiet, fast and extremely easy to configure and setup, if you are thinking about a NAS with Time Machine then get this......you will not be disappointed.

    I recommend that you also externally connect a 2TB HDD and use the "mirror" function so you have a "virtual" RAID1 configuration.

    18 of 22 people found this useful

  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Amazing product

    • Written by from Bournemouth

    This is so easy to setup and works out of the box like all Apple products I have, I have BT Fibre and the HP ENVY 110 AirPrint printer, on the BT Hub this worked some times and would never wake the printer from sleep mode which it should, I now have the latest Time Capsule and everything works just like a dream, very impressed with this product.

    I have the MacBook Pro Retina and backing up to the Time Capsule is fast, effortless and so easy to setup, if you are looking for a wireless backup system this is the one!

    16 of 21 people found this useful

  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    PLEASE DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT

    • Written by from Manningtree

    It looks great, and promises much, but it doesn't work, at least when paired with Apple's Time Machine back-up. You will, for no apparent reason, frequently see this message: "Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new backup for you". This means all your time-stamped backups to date are erased, which renders both Time Machine and Time Capsule worthless. And this happens when used wirelessly, or paired to your computer via ethernet cable, so ignore any posts suggesting power supply or wireless interference might be the issue.
    Please save your money. I wish I had.

    53 of 86 people found this useful

  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Great product!

    • Written by from Sandymount

    Have had this for about 2 years now and have had absolutely no problems with it at all.

    20 of 24 people found this useful