Apple Time Capsule in 2022

Introduction

When owning a mac, if you need to back it up. Time Machine is normally the best option, as it is free and quite well designed. Over the years I have used Time Machine with an external drive to backup my macs and this was always a good solution for me. It’s secure as your backup is disconnected from the live data and as long as you leave it in a different location. Your data is backed up off-site. With USB3 or Thunderbolt, the backups are normally very quick too.

The problem with using external drives is that you are responsible for remembering to backup your Mac. Unless you leave the drives connected at all times, Time Machine can’t backup your data. This also leaves your data vulnerable to ransomware and/or accidental data loss. In my opinion, the best data security is unplugging the drive and locking it in a safe that is out of sight.

The big problem I kept getting was this message:

This worried me because 10 days between backups is a long time. However, all my active data is stored in iCloud drive anyway. But I need the security of being able to restore my mac to a replacement or in the event of an OS corruption.

Why did I want to change?

One of the most powerful features of Time Machine is that it can keep hourly snapshots. This is quite useful to me as I work on a lot of code and having hourly snapshots can get me out of a hole. Totally admit that if I used git correctly, this would not be a problem.

Also, I need to make sure that my mac is backed up regularly for the reasons above.

Solution

The solution was to move my Time Machine to network-based storage. However, this compromises the disconnected aspect of my data protection, as mentioned above. As I might have blogged about before. I have a main NAS at home already in the form of a custom-built TrueNAS server and this has ample storage to accommodate this. However, I did struggle to get a share set up in a way that MacOS would be completely happy with. For simplicity. I decided to go and buy a 2nd hand Time Capsule. Mainly as for the most part, they are plug and play.

Concerns

I did have concerns for a while about the Time Capsules. As they are discontinued. Mainly security concerns. But reading online, there doesn’t seem to be many issues out there. I think my main concern would be if I was using the Time Capsule as a router. But with my existing UniFi network. This was never going to happen. Using the Time Capsule in bridged mode and just using it as storage applied seemed fine to me. Even if it is using the outdated AFP sharing protocol.

Choosing the right one.

Time Capsules are so cheap nowadays that they will sometimes less expensive than buying an external hard drive with equal storage space. For me, I honestly didn’t care what revision or size I got. However the bigger the HDD internally, the longer retention periods I could have. As my MacBook only has a 256GB SSD. I did know that I wanted one that was the same form factor as the Mac Mini so that it could be put on a 1U rackmount shelf.

Setting up

Setting up any of the airport devices is a breeze. But only if you have a mac already. Otherwise, they are kind of useless. I opened up the airport utility and bang. It was discovered right away. I then went through the process of disabling the WiFi and making sure that the routing features were turned off. Once I had set a password. I was kind of there. Because I had configured it on the same machine I wanted to backup. My mac already knew the login details for it and I could connect right away.

Conclusion

I cannot fully conclude how well this is going to work. As I have only just completed my first-time machine backup to the device. But once I have done a few. I will try out the ‘Archive Data’ feature to copy my time machine backups offline. Let’s see how we’ll get on.

Apple, Backup, Capsule, NAS, Storage, Time

Apple, Hardware, Networking, Storage, Tech

January 28, 2022