One of the ways Macintosh has lagged (and this is coming from a fan boy) is in providing decent backup solutions. Apple took a stab at fixing the software side of the problem when it released its latest major OSX upgrade, Leopard, by including a simple-to-use, powerful backup application called Time Machine.

But it works best with a dedicated hard drive, and it requires a hard-wired connection to your Mac. If you already had a wireless network device that could be connected to an external hard drive for file sharing, this was a disappointment.

You can sort of understand the preference for a dedicated hard drive; the Time Machine software writes files somewhat differently to allow you to quickly browse through multiple dates and sessions of data storage to find files. Storing files on your Time Machine drive prevents those files from being backed up and reduces drive space for backup. But Apple's decision to prevent the Time Machine from working wirelessly truly annoyed users, including me.

Apple's "fix" for wireless was to offer a new piece of hardware, a dedicated uber Airport with a built-in hard drive called the Time Capsule. The 500-gigabyte version costs $299 and the one Terabyte (i.e. 1,000 gigabyte) costs $499. Like most Apple hardware, it's not the cheapest solution, but the ease of use and reasonable power justifies the cost.

Time Capsule comes with a USB slot for connecting external hard drives or printers and three additional Ethernet ports for connecting to other network devices or computers.

The first time you back up your computer to Time Capsule, you'll probably want to do so with a hard-wired connection. This doesn't mean that you can't back up wirelessly; the special version of the Airport software that comes with Time Capsule insures that you will. This is more about the time you'll take backing up wirelessly.

We all know that a wireless connection offers you less bandwidth than a wired one. Backing up the 90 GB of data on my laptop via a wireless connection (done that way just cuz I'm perverse and wanted to see how long it would take) took 24 hours as opposed to the 6 it likely would have taken directly connected via USB. However, as with most modern backup solutions, once the initial backup has been done, only the changes made since the last backup are recorded afterwards. So if you back up regularly, you'll be able to do it quickly, even over a wireless connection.

The Time Capsule setup was reasonably painless, as was connecting the other nodes in my house that connect to printer servers, etc. Now I can painlessly back up the four different Macs in my house every night while we sleep, without having to drag the computers to any specific site to get them backed up or even think much about it.

While the Time Capsule is a comparatively pricey solution, it does get the job done.