@gbdoc, tried mightily to keep it going. For the past year, I’ve had it on a weekly reboot schedule (which prevented a lot of problems with Time Machine complaining that backups were unreliable and had to be rebuilt), But reliability in backups is of paramount importance, and when rebooting it stopped being an effective means of maintaining reliability, it was time.
Do older Synology NAS units function as Mac Time Machines? I can plug my laptop into a nearby hard drive when I think of it, but I’d rather have it happen automagically. I owned a Time Capsule until it blew its power supply, and I’ve tried putting an old router with a USB port into service. But a Synology DS210J is available for something like $50-60. Yeah, the reviews of the new model are dated 2010. But would it work?
Picking this up 20 months later… Because of course my Time Machine’s HD has died, and Google points to this discussion…
This gets me about 75% of the way there, largely because it corroborates what is on the Apple Support pages. (Sidebar but Bob Timmons and LaPastenague are consistently great on the topic of drive failures and where to go next in a place which is plagued with people wanting points for telling you to read Apple’s help page and general 1984-style gaslighting. I have long wondered what the other people get out of it: does it help with a Genius interview? I digress.)
Given the many caveats on the WB product, clearly the Synology is the way to go—now the DS120j, which is also cheaper. I’m left intrigued and a little unsatisfied with the article though and given that the conclusion seems to be this is the “correct” way forward (most people, most of the time) I’d benefit from a little more exploration. I see the part about the 128GB SSD and appreciate the point that recovery would be a lot faster, but what does that mean for energy consumption? I am trying to do the maths on the cost of the Time Capsule: I think I got to about $17 (annually) taking guesstimates of idle to disk-writing, and my kWh rate through the day. Based on what I think the Synology numbers are—they say 9.81W at “full operation” (whatever that is!) and somewhere between 6W and 11W for a “representative” 6TB WD external, that’s going to be about 180% of a Time Capsule, which seems to run between 10W and 16W (I guessed 12W as an average).
It’s pretty small potatoes but combined with the neatness of one box—the point of Time Capsule, at any rate—it looks better just to use an internal drive (for me) but am I missing any other benefit of external storage besides quick restores for the as-and-if? In the case of failure presumably an internal is almost as easy to swap out?
The second thing is SSD vs. HD: of course there’s a cost differential but I’m coming from a 2 TB Time Capsule and have never found that problematic. There’s the whole constantly writing to SSD—is that still the thing it was say 10 years ago? No one talks about it. On the other hand, with Time Machine there’s the time for copying files, but there’s also the overhead of just firing up Time Machine to begin with, which can be glacial. Does an SSD help with that?
Then there’s formatting the thing which I am beginning too see is maybe not a world of pain, but a planet of moderate discomfort.
Which to bring my thread reanimation to a close is to say I kind of think there was a super-useful discussion in the article, but the conclusion seems like it could be fleshed out.
Would welcome thoughts! Maybe I should even write this up…! :)
I believe the best way to solve this problem is at its source: Apple should replace the old, discontinued Time Capsule with a reincarnation: a new, improved Time Capsule. I have one of the first ones, and after over a decade it still backs up our two Macs relatively reliably. Sure, there are many other options available today. But none of them sets up so easily and work so seamlessly as Apple’s used to; it just works. What with WiFi speeds and drives so fast today, and modems so much improved - they’re probably making and using some of this stuff already, and probably developing more and better - I’m sure they could do it. We ought to pressure Apple to do so.
1 Like
Attaching a hard drive directly (e.g., via usb) to a networked mac (I have a MacMini) is as easy as a Time Capsule, namely you choose the networked disk from the Time Machine preferences.
—e.
One would think this is the case…but even after going on 30 years of using Macs I’ve found that Time Machine to a network destination is very brittle. It fails frequently to find the destination even though Finder easily finds it on the network…and when you can get it to work it doesn’t work the same to 2 different destination computers reliably the same way despite being set up identically. I ended up rolling my own Time Machine like solution using Carbon Copy Cloner and setting “remote Mac” as the destination, and the versioning it provides does the same thing for me as Time Machine is supposed to do…and it reliably works even if the laptops being backed up are lid closed when it’s time whereas TM fails a lot in that situation. For a locally attached drive…TM is a good solution and works as advertised, but for backup to a remote Mac it simply isn’t reliable. I tried completely resetting up from scratch at least a half dozen times and it works…until it doesn’t. So…shifted to CCC a year and something ago and it is bulletproof. Setting up TM to a remote destination is easy as you say…if only it reliably worked.
What I like most of TM is the file restore interface. I am not sure how CCC deals with a file restore. How usable is the CCC restore interface?
It is true that rarely TM fails, and I have to to some random magic to make it work again…
—e.
There isn’t one because it’s not needed. The clone is Finder readable and you either drag and drop for restoring a lot or dig through the hierarchy to find an individual file. Older versions are put in a folder of you choose that option. I suppose one could just use CCC and create a new job with the old destination as the source and the destination where you wanted to restore to…and that saves the permissions so might be better than a Finder copy anyway.
OTOH…for a full disk clone maybe there is a restore option…never looked for one. You can clone disks or folders or some su folders of a higher folder to a local drive or across the network and thee are a lot of options on what gets cloned as well as reporting, chaining jobs together, and the like. I just looked and the docs cover this.
Now 2 years later, I wonder what people have settled for, or are they perhaps still looking?
I will only consider a network connected solution as we have several laptops, and backing up by manually plugging in external drives is just not an option after more than a decade with the TC’s automatic backups.
I generally have mixed feelings entrusting Time Machine backups to any other than a Mac-native file format. This makes a dedicated Mac (Mini) really the only solution. I’ll be able to increase storage easily as needed, by adding larger external HDDs or SSDs formatted with APFS.
Of course most of all I would appreciate Apple introducing an all-new TC.
1 Like
I have some Time Capsules in use for myself and relatives and, not having experience, I wonder if old Mac minis kicking around would work.
I would think so… as long as it’s not ancient. Personally I will look for a used M1/M2 Mini with basic specs. All it needs to do is manage the sharing of an external drive. Once the Mini has been set up, it won’t require a monitor and you can administer it remotely from any Mac.
If a screen is available, the Mac mini route is great.
If not, you could contemplate a refurb MBA or perhaps a used but well kept M1/2 MBA. All you need is a port for attaching an external drive or a hub for multiple external drives. Since this is for backup of a limited number of clients and over wifi, 10 Gbps USB-C is likely plenty for the drive(s). Such a system should not run you much money at all and thanks to Apple silicon it should have more than enough oomph while still running quiet and reliably for many more years.
In fact, if Apple does indeed release a ~$600 A18-based MacBook as rumors keep mentioning, such a system could also take over duty as a “modern Time Capsule”.
1 Like
I haven’t read the whole long thread but can’t see that simplest, Apple provided option needing no special hardware, is mentioned:
Works for me. My M1MBA backs up to a Time Machine volume on my M4 Mini.
CCC also backs up to my M4 Mini. No wires, no need to plug MBA in. Also no need to keep the backup volumes mounted on the MBA.
Although I have used TM successfully in this way I have switched to CCC because when it comes to whole drive restoring, the CCC backup would be much faster as it can be direct connected for the restore, unlike the TM backup.
1 Like
Agreed on all counts, with a small caveat. You may recall discussion in other threads about how macOS 27 will require Time Machine to use the SMB protocol for network backups, which I believe only arrived in macOS 10.13. Consequently, if you plan on backing up a macOS 27 machine to an older Mac, the older Mac will need to run macOS 10.13 or newer. For a Mac mini, that means a 2010 model or later, though you’d want at least a 2012 model to support USB 3 speeds. That said, a machine capable of running a supported version of macOS would be best.
If you do decide to set up an old mini as a “Time Capsule”, I’d give some thought to limiting it to that specific purpose and limiting the mini to local network access only for security reasons, i.e., no Internet access.
You can run a mini “headless”, i.e., without a display, but you’ll need a display dongle and a way to share its screen. (Also discussed on other threads.)
I do see a few “How To” guides on the net that describe setting up a Linux machine to be a Time Machine server using the appropriate SMB protocols and extensions to support macOS 27 clients. Famous last words, but it looks pretty straightforward if you are comfortable running a few commands on the command line and editing text configuration files. This may actually be a better option than running an unsupported version of macOS, even on older Apple Intel machines.
1 Like
Further to that point. I get the impression that the SMB implementation has evolved as I’m using an old Intel MBA for this purpose and it didn’t work when I initially tried with the latest official supported version of macOS for this MBA. The solution was to install open core legacy patcher and a more recent version of macOS. It has worked reliably since.
Also I’ve set up this MBA with screen sharing to check it remotely and ensures it doesn’t sleep when closed with this command:
sudo pmset -a sleep 0 disksleep 0 disablesleep 1 displaysleep 5 womp 1 powernap 0 autorestart 1
1 Like
Is anyone doing networked Time Machine backups with macOS 26 Tahoe? I’m corresponding with a reader who feels that networked backups to any destination are broken.
I use an M2 Mac Mini running Tahoe as a networked Time Machine backup destination for a machine running Tahoe and another machine running Sequoia. Twice in the last month, the Tahoe client has had trouble backing up, yielding nothing but a cryptic sort of “Can’t back up to destination”. For some reason, restarting the client machine seems to fix this issue. Another time it got stuck with a different error (I think it was something like “backup is busy”) and this wasn’t fixed by restarting either the client laptop or the Mac Mini, but I eventually mounted the backup image directly on the Mac Mini, ran disk first aid (which didn’t report any problems or fixes), and then fully unmounted the backup image device, and that finally seemed to make it work again.
I haven’t seen any such issues with the laptop running Sequoia that backs up the same Mac Mini.
In short, I don’t have definitive information, but I can offer additional anecdotal evidence of trouble with networked Time Machine backups in Tahoe. Time Machine’s error messages are extremely lacking in detail, so problems are very hard to diagnose. I will try to remember to try Howard Oakley’s “The Time Machine Mechanic” next time I run into trouble… maybe it will unearth more useful information about the failures.
I do networked TimeMachine backups from my M4 pro Mac mini to a Synology 1821+. Everything has been solid, connection wise, since day 1.
Only issue I have is an incompatibility between Synology and some GarageBand files which is a known issue. (Has to do with the name of the files).
I am and yes, broken for me. I have a WD raid which has a designated Time Machine share. Been beating my head against it, about to designate a directly attached disk and move to that. I have Chronosync backups too so covered in that regard.
I’ve got macOS Tahoe clients with TM running on macOS Sequoia working fine. Sharing over SMB.