I often forget to plug my external USB drive into the MacBook Air to run Time Machine. If I go into Time Machine, I can see today and yesterday’s hourly backup in the timeline, but I cannot see beyond yesterday. I suspect that I didn’t plug in the USB drive. And so, this got me thinking, should I hunt for a 3TB Airport Time Capsule in eBay and buy it so I can backup wirelessly? What do you use? (NAS is probably too expensive and produce a lot of heat and so, I’m not into it)
I am using an Eero router and there is no USB port. Looks like I need to be discipline enough to plug it in every one or two days.
I’m still using a Time Capsule (in fact I have two) but, honestly, they’re pretty old. If you do find one I’d recommend replacing the drive immediately.
2 Likes
The Airport Time Capsule is essentially a NAS - there should be no extra heat than than Time Capsule. I’d be hesitant to get an old Time Capsule, as the drives are likely to fail, so you wouldn’t be a good position anyhow.
A Synology DS120j is just over £100, add in a hard drive of choice and that would do network Time Machine backups. Heat should be no real difference to running the hard drive in the a disk enclosure, though might be slightly higher as it’ll have a CPU as well, but the 120j is a small ARM processor, so nothing hugely power hungry.
2 Likes
The day Apple announced its discontinuation of the Time Capsule, I went out to to my local Apple Store and bought a new one from among the remaining few on the shelf. It’s still going strong, but running only every four hours under direction from the TimeMachineEditor app. But I also back up my Mac each evening using Carbon Copy Cloner to an external drive I plug in and then unplug after the backup. Most days I use the same drive, but on Fridays I use the next drive in rotation from a set of four weekly backups.
Well if the primary data is on the Mac, then the Synology is just a backup. Following 3-2-1, you should have another copy offsite anyhow.
My Synology backs up to Synology C2 offsite, so I’ve got my primary data on the Mac, backups on the NAS and then offsite with C2. I also have an offline copy kept at work. I currently have less than 300GB of data that I’ve deemed that I need multiple backups of. The rest would be hinderance if it was lost, but nothing major.
1 Like