Time Machine won’t back up because ‘some files unavailable’

It’s definitely doable, though mortality rates can vary.

Given the age of Time Capsules themselves, or, if you’re not a tinkerer, connecting an external drive to your Time Capsule and setting it up as a new backup destination probably is a better option. It avoids cracking open the older device, and, in case the whole Time Capsule ever fails, it is relatively straightforward to move the external drive to another Mac for Time Machine use.

You can either start from scratch with a new Time Machine backup to the external drive, or you can transfer the Time Machine snapshots from the internal drive to the external drive. Personally, I lean toward starting from scratch, while keeping the original internal drive untouched in case you need to retrieve an older file.

I haven’t tried it myself, but I think you can use the “Archive” command in some versions of the Air Port Utility app to duplicate the internal drive to an external drive. Assuming that is correct, I would temporarily disable Time Machine on your Macs, perform the Time Machine archive operation, and then use the external drive as the new Time Machine destination. Perhaps others can chime in.

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Still working just fine. Although DU did not report any errors, nor that it fixed anything, somehow that seems to have done something beneficial to the original backup disk. Weird…

Thank you for the link. It was interesting reading.

Yes, that’s me, in my old age with shaky hands. I used to crack the original Macintosh cases, but that was then and this is now.

I have a disk already connected, as a shared storage. There isn’t much on it (maybe 25 GB?). Could I replace it with a 2 TB SSD, formatted into two partitions (one for shared storage, say 50 GB, and the balance as the new Time Machine disk)? If so, I assume I would partition the new disk while attached to a Mac and then move it to the Time Capsule. Any thoughts? Thanks.

Time Machine will happily work with more than one external drive for backups and will alternate between available drives.

My strategies…

I use several drives, including an SSD that I keep “off site” (in the car!). Over the years (decades) I have had TM drive failures and substituted a new drive without issues. The unaffected drives remained available for older backups.

I do use CCC every few weeks and store the drive in a safe. I also use Chronosync to store a copy of important data to another Mac.

and a plug for Take Control…

I am pretty sure the answer is “Yes” to both questions, though I can’t say I recall doing exactly that myself. IIRC, both partitions would need to be HFS+ formatted to work with a Time Capsule. No APFS.

I still use a large external hard disk that is partitioned - one for TM and the other for data such as Photos. But that is connected directly to the Mac.

I also have a hard disk connected to a Time Capsule (eg plugging the HD drive, with its own power supply into the USB port on the Time Capsule). This works as a Time Machine drive but is very slow as the Time Capsule is very limited with its bit rate. For this reason I don’t use it for regular TM backups but activate it every few months.

An SSD connected to the Time Capsule would not make much difference, compared with a hard drive and there would likely be an issue with its power supply.

Also the Airport Utility might be needed to set it up (I can’t remember how I set up the hard drive - it was along time ago).

Thanks. That item of information was in the “I knew that but had forgotten it” category.

Yes, the port on the Time Capsule (at least the one I have) is USB 2. It was not an issue because Time Machine ran in the background. (See AirPort Time Capsule 802.11ac - Technical Specifications.)

I believe the SSD would draw little enough power that it would not be an issue. I’m pretty sure I tried it a few years ago, but I could be misremembering.

AirPort Utility offers to format the internal Time Capsule drive, but not the external drive, in my experience. Since it’s external, it’s simple to format the drive while it’s connected to the Mac and then move it to the Time Capsule.