After the Time Capsule, what do people do for local networked backups?

I can see why Apple is discontinuing the line, but I will miss my Time Capsule when it dies. I would love to see TidBits do an article on local networked backup of Macs (i.e. set and forget backups for laptops, no drives to plugin).

Easy. If yu have a Mac that is always on just create a shared folder and point Time Machine to it. It will mount and I mount as needed, and the backup will be a sparse image file. Works great for laptop backups…and I have the ‘server’ (a mini in my case) clone the data drive to other attached drives so there multiple copies of the backup…I also clone them weekly to a drive that lives in my truck and car.

neil

Has anyone here used Arq for local networked backups?

https://www.arqbackup.com/

I considered it but ended up with a bunch of Carbon Copy Cloner jobs instead as I already owned it. Also have TM running on laptops to .dmg files on the Mini.

neil

I use Chronosync locally to a bunch of HDs. But curious to hear about Wasabi if anyone uses it, which Arq can back up to.

https://s3.wasabisys.com/

Not that it’s cost-effective in any way, but I use the time machine capability on a Drobo 5N. I wouldn’t recommend it, though. My iMac inexplicably stopped working with it. Every week or so it would say the Time Machine backup was corrupted and had to create a new one. The Mac Mini still worked fine, though. So now the iMac backs up to an external disc connected to the Time Capsule. My wife’s MacBook Pro backs up to the Time Capsule’s internal drive.

Yes, I do use Arq for both offsite and local backup. For local, I have an external drive hanging off my Mac mini and set up SFTP backup to it using Arq on an iMac and MBA. It works great for me. If I ever have to restore, it’s a lot faster to have it locally, but I still have offsite (with Backblaze B2 and Microsoft OneDrive for a few things - since I have 1TB of storage with Office365) for, you know, a disaster.

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I have local drive Time Machine for my main computers and I have a synology Time Machine share for the laptops.

But the primary line of defense is Backblaze, Dropbox, and iCloud Drive. All the important documents live in all those places.

All my non-video and non-photography data reside in Dropbox and iCloud.
The video and photo are all duped over two raids using Chronosync
Flickr Pro has a copy of every JPEG I own.
I have Chronosync backing up to a Network drive
I have Time Machine backups to another drive
My wife’s machine has a time machine backup on the Time Capsule.
I’m curious to back up all my photos and video work on the Cloud, arq and wasabi might be the ticket.

@tommy - do you make bootable Chronosync backups? I picked it many years ago after discussions here and like it, but I’ve never been able to get a bootable backup. Which isn’t the worst thing as my documents are the most important things to me. But I’m curious.

Diane

@dianed143 I’ve never thought of using it for that. It’s cloning to a volume on a Network drive so not perhaps an option. Now that you mention it, it’s probably a good idea to try…

I just sync to an external drive, but even doing that I get some rollback errors deep in the system.

It’s way down on the todo list to figure out the issue but I guess if my docs are there I’m happy. Let me know how you make out!

Diane

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What to do when my time Capsule dies ? I have the same question as above and have not seen any reply above that seems useful to me. My Time Capsule has an attached USB2 2.5" drive partitioned in two partitions (mac A and mac B). With this setup, I can back-up my two computers (mac A and mac B), each one having a backup on the main drive of the time capsule and an additional backup on its dedicated partition on the USB drive. Thus, when something goes wrong in any of the three backup partitions, I can reformat it and start afresh while the other two partitions happily keep on trucking. Quite handy. But how to do the same without a Time Capsule ?

Should I buy a spare time Capsule ?

You should be able to buy a network drive to do this. I have a LaCie one from several years ago, and I know Western Digital also have a range of network storage.

Thanks for the hint. I looked into my Joe on Tech guide. it lists NAS storage which claim compatibility with time Machine (a not so obvious feature, apparently). That may be it. Not sure it is cheaper but worth trying.

https://joeontech.net/extras/buym/hardware.html#NAS

Thanks.

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