[rsmiller]

My 4 year old Time Capsule just died so I'm running off an old Airport Express. Before I spend $299 for another Time Capsule (4x the storage and $200 less than I paid in 2008), I was wondering the following:

1. Would it be better to buy an Airport Extreme for $179 then plug USB drives into it, and run Time Machine from there? Or is backing up to an Airport Disk with Time Machine still not supported? I am talking about backups for 3-5 Macs, mixture of laptops and desktops. One of the concerns I had when I first bought the Time Capsule was what to do if the drive went bad before the router - it could be a very expensive paperweight - but thankfully it lasted 4 years. Still, it is more appealing to me to be able to plug in my own drives into an Airport Extreme so I can carry backups offsite, etc. Is anyone doing it this way and consistently getting it to work?

2. Or maybe I should investigate Crash Plan and forget Time Capsule/Time Machine? My needs have changed a little bit since 2 kids are at college now, and it is appealing to have them backed up remotely during the school year as well. As it was with the Time Capsule, they only got backed up when they were home, since no matter what I said, they never got around to backing up their laptops to DropBox, USB drives etc. Does anyone have any real world comments re Crash Plan? Reviews seem pretty good, but my concerns are how slow is it, does it slow down your network when backing up, how complicated to administer multiple machines, etc.?

[gg987]

I have used Crash Plan on 2 Macs for several yrs. it's a no brainer. Time to back up and restore depends on size. A file or 2 restores very quickly. A very large folder could take a day. I've never had a problem with it. Highly recommend it and prefer it over time capsule, especially since it will work anywhere.