Thinking of buying a Macbook - A few questions

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Afternoon all,

I'm thinking of buying a Macbook pro (retina) having never owned a Mac before and was hoping some of you kind folk could assist?

I currently have all my media (music/film/photos) on a HP microserver running WHS 2011, would my potential new buy have any problems accessing the shares on this device? Are there any little 'quirks' I should know about that could change or interrupt my current workflow as a result of using a Mac to connect to a windows share?

Would the time capsule software be able to use this same microserver to back up to?

I'm sure there's going to be plenty more questions the more I think about this potential investment, but for now, that's it!

Many thanks
 
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Your Mac's Specs
MBP 17" 2011, 2.3GHz Intel Quad-Core i7, 8GB RAM, MacMini 2011, 2.7GHz Intel Dual-Core i7, 8GB RAM
Time Capsule is hardware. Time Machine is the software. I would (and do) use a separate HD all for TM that is 2x what the drive size is on the MBP. My drive is 500GB and I have a 1TB drive hooked to my Airport Extreme. All that drive is there for is Time Machine.

You would need to look at the specs for the HP Microserver and see if it is Time Machine compatible. I know Western Digital LifeBooks and others are, but you need to check. there are dangers, however. If you already have data on the drive, even if you repartition it, and something fails, you have now lost not only your data, but your backups as well.

As for your workflow, need more information.
 
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Many thanks for the reply.

Can time machine back up across a network, i.e to a NAS?

With regards to my workflow, although I'm certainly no Pro I do use my current laptop a great deal for photo editing. I use lightroom with all my photo's on the microserver, would the mac book happily map to the microserver (which is running windows home server) in the same way my current win7 laptop does?
 
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Only if the NAS supports Time Machine. You are going to have to look that up or call HP.

Make sure to grant yourself read/write access to the share and you should be fine. I would not suggest using iPhoto if the files are already organized via Lightroom. Either buy a copy of Lightroom for OSX or have your Windows licensed version transferred to OSX.
 

Slydude

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You might find this thread interesting. It covers a number of options for setting up Time Machine backups. It looks more intimidating summary than it is.
 
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Thank you both for the input.

I'm thinking of getting the 250gb model, how much space does the OS install typicallly take up?
 

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