New iMac, looking at Time Capsule

[HeavyDuty]

My 12+ XP Pro box has been dying a slow, terrible death so I needed a new desktop - my use is mostly browsing and email, but also photo processing.

I had been considering a 5K 27" iMac for months, and I finally found a good enough NOS deal on the immediately prior version to jump. $750 off is hard to argue with... and it's the exact model I was considering in September. Plus, the newest version has mostly degraded specs compared to this version - I can't believe they reduced the SSD in their 1TB Fusion drives to only 24GB. This one still has 128GB SSD.

I'd like to set up wireless network storage to be used as a shared device for the iMac, my iPad and iPhone and the GF's MacBook - possibly also for the TV.

Any Time Capsule users here that can comment on whether Apple's device is worth it, or whether I should look third party?

 

[Selta]

I've messed with them a bit, and at one point had my wife's MBP using one for her TimeMachine backups.

I have a lot of complaints about them, but the absolute show stopper was the size limit. Even now, the biggest out there is 3TB. While enough for most people probably, it is no where near enough for us. Especially with now working on a 24MP camera (Nikon D610) shooting RAW, and sooner or later going to be working in some video. I never did find out for certain, but I believe they are all just a single drive as well, which isn't adequate in my mind - redundancy is practically a must. It felt slow, but it is not supposed to be fast storage - I never did I/O testing on it to see what it's actual performance was.

Presently, I have a single Synology 1513+ loaded with 4TB disks in RAID6. I could not be happier with the price, performance or stability of it. I use it for virtual machines, bulk storage (audio, video, installers, documents, etc), timemachine backups and have it backing up to CrashPlan. Eventually, I plan on adding a 2nd Synology (or the expansion device for mine, not sure which just yet) that'll hold a replica set of data, so I'll have 2x on site, and one offsite storage.

IF the Time Capsule meets all of your needs they're decent enough. I'd just take a strong look at all 3rd party options, and see if the Apple product really offers anything above and beyond.

 

[Fleebag]

Edit: sorry I was thinking about time machine, not sure how time capsule differs.

Luckily I have not yet needed to use any backups (knock knock), I use carbon copy cloner to backup files like photos and music to an external drive and as an additional measure backup to TM once or twice a month. I did a fair bit of research before deciding, but it seemed pretty unanimous that ccc and superduper were the two to beat in terms of ease and speed to get back up and running if your compute was to die. Need to get another hard drive then I'll start keeping ccc fully bootable clones instead of TM. I don't have any experience with networks.