How do I replicate Apple’s Time Capsule?
September 25, 2024 12:07 PM Subscribe
I miss having a way to update my Time Machine backup wirelessly and automatically when my Mac laptop is on my home network. Apple no longer makes the Time Capsule, but that’s essentially the functionality I want. How do I do that with current tech while keeping cost low and prioritizing reliability and stability over speed?
I currently have a router that doesn’t have USB capabilities, so I could buy a new router, but which one? I am also considering NAS (specifically Synology) but that seems like overkill. I spent yesterday “researching” but the amount of information is kind of overwhelming, so if you have a system in your house that works, or if you have specific suggestions for hardware, I’d love to hear about it.
Also, if anyone has opinions about whether the Synology Beestation would work for this, and/or if it would be overkill, that would be amazing to hear
I currently have a router that doesn’t have USB capabilities, so I could buy a new router, but which one? I am also considering NAS (specifically Synology) but that seems like overkill. I spent yesterday “researching” but the amount of information is kind of overwhelming, so if you have a system in your house that works, or if you have specific suggestions for hardware, I’d love to hear about it.
Also, if anyone has opinions about whether the Synology Beestation would work for this, and/or if it would be overkill, that would be amazing to hear
Hmm, I missed the last part of your question. The BeeStation is new, and seems to be a locked down version of the main products, the DiskStation variants. Not sure if the BeeStation will do the TC stuff. If it does, that wouldn't be overkill. But, you probably can't do the Back Blaze stuff I mentioned.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 12:20 PM on September 25, 2024 [1 favorite]
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 12:20 PM on September 25, 2024 [1 favorite]
Apple's Time Machine software will work with any Mac-friendly removable storage or network drive, and will behave very similarly to the old Time Capsule experience. Depending on which version of macOS you're running, the backup disk should be formatted APFS (10.13 or later) or macOS Extended (10.12 or earlier), and ideally, the backup drive should be at least double the capacity of the drive you're backing up. (If your computer has 1TB of storage, your backup drive should ideally be at least 2TB.) Still takes a little bit of setting up, telling it what you want to be tagged for automatic backup, and which backup drive to use, but after that it's really quite "set it and forget it."
Synology is a great option if you can afford the cost. If you're willing to do a bit of tinkering, you can build a Raspberry Pi-based NAS for very cheap, especially if you can reuse some surplus drives for storage.
posted by xedrik at 12:21 PM on September 25, 2024 [1 favorite]
Synology is a great option if you can afford the cost. If you're willing to do a bit of tinkering, you can build a Raspberry Pi-based NAS for very cheap, especially if you can reuse some surplus drives for storage.
posted by xedrik at 12:21 PM on September 25, 2024 [1 favorite]
This answer is somewhat tangent to your question, but it's another approach to consider: If you have a newish MacBook with a USB-C/Thunderbolt port, you can get a hub that will provide power to your Mac and also give you a place to plug in a hard drive that should just mount when you plug in (as well as any external monitors or whatever you may be using; some external monitors can function as this hub). On the assumption that you'll be plugging in your laptop at some point anyhow, there's no added step to get your backups going. One cable will do it.
This is what I do. Years ago, I had an Apple wifi hub, to which I attached a 3rd-party hard drive. In theory, Time Machine was supposed to work with that setup. In fact, I found it problematic and gave up on it.
posted by adamrice at 1:15 PM on September 25, 2024 [1 favorite]
This is what I do. Years ago, I had an Apple wifi hub, to which I attached a 3rd-party hard drive. In theory, Time Machine was supposed to work with that setup. In fact, I found it problematic and gave up on it.
posted by adamrice at 1:15 PM on September 25, 2024 [1 favorite]
Best answer: A Synology NAS can act as a network drive that can be used as a Time Machine back up. I’ve done this. It works. You can get excellent performance, especially if the NAS is on a wired ethernet connection and the drive you’re backing up to is an SSD.
But unless performance is very important to you and you enjoy fiddling with computers I would strongly consider simply buying a used Time Capsule on eBay. They are slow but they still work. I got a 3 TB model for around $50 last year. For these purposes (passive backup). I don’t mind the performance.
posted by caek at 2:55 PM on September 25, 2024 [1 favorite]
But unless performance is very important to you and you enjoy fiddling with computers I would strongly consider simply buying a used Time Capsule on eBay. They are slow but they still work. I got a 3 TB model for around $50 last year. For these purposes (passive backup). I don’t mind the performance.
posted by caek at 2:55 PM on September 25, 2024 [1 favorite]
Best answer: There are Mac backup programs that can auto backup to a local file server and probably to a remote one, like a cloud backup. Carbon Copy Cloner comes to mind, also SuperDuper and I used to use another program called Chronometer I think it was called. Also Retrospect.
You could just get an account on Backblaze. They can give you a app you install that will back up your Mac to their servers. That's more of a consumer thing to do. Last time I used it I was paying around $100 a year for one box..that's my recall.
I have a Synology NAS at home now. Synology gives you a backup client for your box which backs up to the NAS, then the NAS backs itself up at night. None of this is 'hard' but it's not trivial to do either.
posted by diode at 4:18 PM on September 25, 2024 [1 favorite]
You could just get an account on Backblaze. They can give you a app you install that will back up your Mac to their servers. That's more of a consumer thing to do. Last time I used it I was paying around $100 a year for one box..that's my recall.
I have a Synology NAS at home now. Synology gives you a backup client for your box which backs up to the NAS, then the NAS backs itself up at night. None of this is 'hard' but it's not trivial to do either.
posted by diode at 4:18 PM on September 25, 2024 [1 favorite]
I have an ancient Time Capsule whose hard drive died some time ago but which still works with a plugged-in hard drive for Time Machine purposes. I've been asking myself what I will do when it kicks the bucket, so following this Ask with interest, but also...they're still out there working!
posted by praemunire at 4:28 PM on September 25, 2024 [2 favorites]
posted by praemunire at 4:28 PM on September 25, 2024 [2 favorites]
Best answer: I got a Synology NAS a couple of years ago for this very purpose. After buying the NAS and equipping it with RAID quality hard drives sufficient to back up three Macs, it was an expensive proposition, in the $1,000 range.
I didn't find it to be anything approaching the simplicity of Time Capsule's set it and forget it. It has its own operating system that you access through web browser. Apps and such need to be updated, etc.
It has also never been reliable for me. I had some network issues that I eventually resolved and got the NAS Time Machine backups working again, but I checked just now in my menubar and it says "Latest Backup September 2".
I don't know anything about the beestation. If it's more of an appliance and it supports Time Machine, that could be the ticket. I wouldn't recommend a full-on Synology NAS unless you want it to have a little hobby of setting it up and keeping it running.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 6:44 PM on September 25, 2024 [3 favorites]
I didn't find it to be anything approaching the simplicity of Time Capsule's set it and forget it. It has its own operating system that you access through web browser. Apps and such need to be updated, etc.
It has also never been reliable for me. I had some network issues that I eventually resolved and got the NAS Time Machine backups working again, but I checked just now in my menubar and it says "Latest Backup September 2".
I don't know anything about the beestation. If it's more of an appliance and it supports Time Machine, that could be the ticket. I wouldn't recommend a full-on Synology NAS unless you want it to have a little hobby of setting it up and keeping it running.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 6:44 PM on September 25, 2024 [3 favorites]
Synology seems overkill. You could make a perfectly reasonable NAS with a Raspberry Pi and a portable USB SSD.
Plug the SSD into the Raspberry Pi. Connect the Raspberry Pi to your router via ethernet cable. Cables are done!
Configure OpenSSH on both computers so that you can connect to the Raspberry Pi with public key authentication.
Set up a cron-job on the Raspberry Pi to run your backup script on some regular cadence (e.g. weekly). Your backup script should be a shell script which:
(1) creates a directory on the RPi for the new backup
(2) runs rsync -av (plus maybe some other options) to copy the files you care about from the client to the new dir on the RPi
(3) runs tar -J -cvf on the new dir to compress it
Or, if you want the backup to be continuous instead of periodic, you could just good ol' Syncthing. Beautiful piece of software for continuous synchronization.
If you want lots of backup storage, upgrade the portable USB SSD to a SATA one. You will need to get a SATA shield for the RPi to enable this.
You could even go all the way to a SATA SSD RAID array on the RPi.
posted by gunwalefunnel at 7:24 PM on September 25, 2024 [1 favorite]
Plug the SSD into the Raspberry Pi. Connect the Raspberry Pi to your router via ethernet cable. Cables are done!
Configure OpenSSH on both computers so that you can connect to the Raspberry Pi with public key authentication.
Set up a cron-job on the Raspberry Pi to run your backup script on some regular cadence (e.g. weekly). Your backup script should be a shell script which:
(1) creates a directory on the RPi for the new backup
(2) runs rsync -av (plus maybe some other options) to copy the files you care about from the client to the new dir on the RPi
(3) runs tar -J -cvf on the new dir to compress it
Or, if you want the backup to be continuous instead of periodic, you could just good ol' Syncthing. Beautiful piece of software for continuous synchronization.
If you want lots of backup storage, upgrade the portable USB SSD to a SATA one. You will need to get a SATA shield for the RPi to enable this.
You could even go all the way to a SATA SSD RAID array on the RPi.
posted by gunwalefunnel at 7:24 PM on September 25, 2024 [1 favorite]
I built a NAS running TrueNAS that I use primarily as a Time Machine server. It's been perfectly reliable and is at least an existence proof that Time Machine will play nice with non-Apple hardware. I wouldn't recommend it though unless you're pretty technical and interested in tinkering with this stuff, and even then the Synology stuff is tempting. It's really too bad that Apple discontinued their offering because it was exactly what most people need. Those iCloud subscriptions won't sell themselves, I guess.
It looks like the BeeStation works with Time Machine, with a bit of faffing about. I've never used one but seems reasonable to me. The main downside to me is only one drive, I'd rather have redundancy.
posted by davidest at 8:45 PM on September 25, 2024 [1 favorite]
It looks like the BeeStation works with Time Machine, with a bit of faffing about. I've never used one but seems reasonable to me. The main downside to me is only one drive, I'd rather have redundancy.
posted by davidest at 8:45 PM on September 25, 2024 [1 favorite]
I run Samba as Time Machine targets following Samba Project's own configuration guide -- How to configure Samba to Work Better with Mac OS X. You can configure a Raspberry Pi or a Linux PC to fill the gap.
posted by k3ninho at 5:28 AM on September 26, 2024 [1 favorite]
posted by k3ninho at 5:28 AM on September 26, 2024 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: Thanks everybody! This is exactly the kind of information I was looking for. I still have a lot to think about/look into, but this gives me a starting point and some alternatives. I appreciate y'all so much.
posted by hapticactionnetwork at 9:02 AM on September 26, 2024 [1 favorite]
posted by hapticactionnetwork at 9:02 AM on September 26, 2024 [1 favorite]
To add to @xedrik's post, Mrs Tiller and I each use an iMac, each with a Crucial SSD always plugged in, and our Time Machines pointed at them. They're speedy and trouble free, and work like the TM part of a Time Capsule, but *faster*. They're especially faster at finding old backups, where hard-drive Time Capsules could be agonizingly slow when they'd been in use for a while. Setting it up is as easy as selecting your SSD in TM's setup dialog.
posted by TruncatedTiller at 10:10 AM on September 27, 2024
posted by TruncatedTiller at 10:10 AM on September 27, 2024
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But, the great news is that if you can eat the cost of a Synology NAS, not only is the Time Capsule part great and (relatively) easy to setup, you can turn around and very easily do stuff like add Back Blaze integration to do invisible offsite backups of your onsite TC stuff. I also use mine as a "Dropbox" replacement I can access from anywhere.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 12:17 PM on September 25, 2024 [4 favorites]