PowerPage Associate Editor and Podcast regular, Chuck Freedman, picked up a new Apple Time Capsule: the Airport Extreme and NAS storage device. Here's some photos of the unboxing.

Saturday I made it into my local Apple Store and found that they finally have in stock, the new Apple Time Capsule. This is Apple's recently announced combination Airport Extreme and automatic wireless backup for any computer on your network. I picked up the 1TB model.

The unboxing photos show the packaging and dimensions. The unit is about two inches larger square than its Airport Extreme base station, cousin.

I connected the device and read the mini-manual. There's a new version of the Airport Utility (v 5.3) which is required to run the TC. It comes on the included CD. It was an easy install. Upon running the updated Airport utility, the new Time Capsule showed up immediately, even wirelessly. Check out the unboxing photos to see some screen grabs of the utility.

The part that was the most impressive was the setup wizard. It immediately discovered that I previously had a wireless network and gave me several options. One of the choices asked "I have a wireless network and want to add Time Capsule or replace an existing device on my network."

The wizard then prompted me with next steps, of which I selected "I want to replace an existing base station or wireless router with Time Capsule." Impressive. Click continue and all the settings from my previous Airport Extreme base station were transferred to my new Time Capsule (Except IP range for some reason). A few questions about naming the share, and voila. Normally the IP thing wouldn't have been an issue, but since my Xerox color laser printer has a static IP, I had to change the IP range in the utility under the Manual settings. Took a few seconds and a base station restart, and all continued normally.

My Leopard machine immediately saw the new Time Capsule in the sidebar. Once I launched Time Machine, it saw the drive and immediately asked if I wanted to use the share for my Time Machine backup.

Since I have over 100GB of data on my machine, the backup is taking a while as it trickle-backs up in the background.

On my shared Tiger machine, the drive simply appeared in the side bar. I was able to copy data over no problem. My next test is to try and get my son's PC laptop (PC's are required in his school) to see the share. And, of course, I want to test the RESTORE, as what's the point of a backup without the ability to restore? I'll update when I find out.

I think Apple's really got a good thing going. Now, if they'd only update their .Mac service so that my new Time Machine backup will sync up to my .Mac account. A backup is not secure until it's off site. Oh, and it better be cost effective.

I have to state that not everything went smoothly. At one point I decided to play around a bit with the settings and I screwed something up. So in the process of resetting (and reformatting the drive) using the Disks tab in the Airport Utility, the system began the erase process and simply never returned.

After about an hour I had to pull the plug and hope for the best. A few minutes later the drive appeared in the Airport utility and sure enough the setup was just as easy the second time.

The question is why the Airport Extreme with an attached USB 1TB drive didn't operate so easily? I guess that's an article for another post.