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Advice needed for relative newbie to apple world

S

smh1971

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 25, 2013
4
0
Australia
Hi All
Am after some advice as family are becoming more and more apple centric.

Current apple/IOS devices iphone5, atv2 (last of 720p) and two IPAD2's.

Current Sumsung i5 laptop becoming flaky (and we don't need portable) so thinking may go the Mac Mini route (don't need display as have 2x Lenovo 220's).

Home device is used for day to day (mail, web, office wp and spreadsheeet related suff)but primarily as storage for Media - Movies, TV, Photos and Music.

Have cable broadband connected to wi-fi router with multiple external harddrives horribly connected Samsung Laptop for back ups - which i never seem to get around to doing properly ....

So am thinking
1) Mac Mini i7 2.3 quad core with 1tb serial ATA drive
2) 2tb time capsure (around 600gb in photos and media) for storage and back up.
or 3) external 2tb drive that would run permantly as storage for media (streamed to ATV)

Do i need more than 4gb ram?
2.3 vs 2.6 Ghz?
Any specific advantages of TC vs external drive
How's the wireless perforance of MM to TC? Not a huge distance to router but one brick wall!
Any advice around migrating media from windows to IOS without setting the house of fire?

What else haven't i thought about?

Should i wait for the 2013 spec MM with new Wifi standards (c rather than n?)

Cheers

Simon
 
Apologies - use will be primarily for steaming of media to ATV and for light to medium websurfing, some wordprocessing/spreadsheets and email!

Simon
 
smh1971 said:
2) 2tb time capsure (around 600gb in photos and media) for storage and back up.
What else haven't i thought about?
Click to expand...
What will happen to the "storage" data if the Time Capsule fails?

A backup needs to be on a separate physical device from the source data.
 
benwiggy - thanks for pointing out the obvious .... so would you recommend keeping all the source on the MM and the TC as back up?

Would I be better off with a WD mybook either stand alone (one back up the other as library) or separate ones daisy chained?
 
I have a 3TB WD MyBook as my backup drive and it's a nice piece of kit. The only advantage of the TC is that it's networked, AFAIK.

It doesn't really matter where you store your data, as long as you have a backup on another device.

So if you have data on an external, you need another external to back it up.
 
benwiggy is correct you need a good sized external for backup.

I suggest you also have a clone of the internal mini drive. Time machine is good it auto backups every 15 minutes but if the internal drive crashes time machine does not boot. So recovery is slow. A low cost booter clone plus time machine is better.

this would be your booter clone


http://www.amazon.com/Passport-Port...id=1361883610&sr=1-1&keywords=western+digital


this would be your time machine

http://www.amazon.com/Book-External...id=1361883665&sr=1-4&keywords=western+digital


this is a free clone program for mac. the free program will make a bootable clone. you can pay for it and use the more exotic features ,but you do not have to pay to make a bootable clone.


http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

The clone for booting does not need to stay attached 24/7.

If you are like me you have 2 clones just in case.
 
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Thanks all, think i might go for quad core 2.3 - will use timecapsule as media server and wd or similar as back up (and boot clone)

Appreciate the feedback!

Simon
 
Last edited:
I have a simple USB 3 toshiba external hard drive linked to time machine, seems to work perfectly fine.
 
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