My partner and I are about to move into our first office in a few days. Our office equipment consists of just a Macbook Air, a Macbook Pro 17″, and a rather old -but trusted- HP 1320 laser printer. For a small office of just 2 people, our initial requirements are simple; we want to have a wireless network, share the printer, and to share files. A backup solution would be nice too.
The first question that came to my mind was, “So, how do we create a small network for our Macs?” We want to get started quickly with solving problems that matter to our business rather than getting into networking adventures. I looked at what Apple has to offer as a drop-in solution.
As far as I understand the 2 solutions from Apple that meet our needs are the AirPort Extreme with an external USB hard-drive plugged in, or the Time Capsule which has a hard-drive (1TB or 2TB) built-in.
Apple Time Capsule
With either of these, we will have a wireless network (with the option to let our guests connect to a guest network), we can connect our printer to either of them and print over the network, and we can have shared folders to store business files. The Time Capsule also works as a Time Machine backup.
I thought that the AirPort Extreme with a USB drive connected can function as a Time Machine too. After a bit of searching I came across Using an Airport Extreme and USB hard drive as a small office backup system. According to this discussion using AirPort Extreme with USB drive as Time Machine may require a tweak to work and that makes it less plug-and-play. If you are interested in following this route, I would advice you to do some more research to confirm if the setup will work the way you need.
Overall, the Time Capsule solution seems good enough for creating our small office network, it ticks all the boxes and seems adequate for 2 to 4 Macs that we will be using. I toyed with the idea of using AirPort Extreme with a Raid USB drive but I think the ease of all-in-one solution of the Time Capsule fits our modest needs the best.
At some point in the near future I will look into off-site backups to complement this solution and I may write about our experiences with the Time Capsule.