Network Time Machine Backups: Moving on from the Time Capsule

Very nice article.

But, speaking from my experience as a consultant, I find that the vast majority of laptop users, myself included, are unlikely to plug in a drive regularly.

Just a tip for other notebook users who might be in the same situation. Also in light of the article’s conclusion that there really is no product on the market that checks all the boxes for a desirable network TM solution.

If you regularly plug in your MB to charge, be it at the office or at home, you can make a local inexpensive backup work without any added effort. Just get a simple USB-C hub with PD passthrough and connect your USB drive and your charger cable to that. From then on, instead of plugging in your charger cable, just plug your hub into you MB. No extra effort required. Your MB will charge just the same, it will automount the attached USB disk, and TM will perform its thing. The only step to remember is to eject the TM disk before you disconnect your MB when you’re done charging.

Here’s a decent USB hub with passthrough for 100W power. $20.
https://www.amazon.com/uni-Charging-Thunderbolt-Aluminum-Pixelbook/dp/B08SVZFFPP/

Your article came about a week after I had to deal with the same thing! Luckily, I came to similar conclusions, even if I didn’t find all the options that you did.

We decided to replace our Final-generation Time Capsule with a mesh Wi-Fi network, so we needed something to replace the Time Machine functionality. I ended up taking an existing (large) hard drive and connecting it to my 27-inch iMac (2020), setting it up for sharing as a Time Machine volume. One benefit that you didn’t mention about using an Ethernet-connected Mac for Time Machine backups is that you can also use it for Content Caching, since both functions require the Mac to be on at all times. I’ve been using that functionality since Caching Server was first introduced, so this didn’t require any change in my routines. So far, so good.

Since this is a USB 2.0 solution, I don’t think the slow performance of a hard drive will matter that much.

For example, a Toshiba N300 (3.5" internal) HDD has a maximum data transfer rate of 230-270 MB/s (that is 1.8-2.1 Gbit/s, depending on model). This is far far faster than USB 2.0’s 480 Mbit/s maximum speed. Even lower-performing consumer desktop HDD’s (which, unfortunately, don’t publish performance specs) should have absolutely no problem keeping up with the slow speed of a USB 2.0 interface.

In other words, if you think USB 2.0 is acceptable, then I see no reason why you would consider an HDD unacceptable. Conversely, if you feel HDD performance is unacceptably slow, then anything with USB 2.0 will be even more unacceptable, ruling out the use of an AirPort Extreme router altogether.

It’s available for earlier versions of macOS via Apple’s macOS Server app.

Note, however, that modern versions of Server have far far less functionality than the older versions. If your system is running High Sierra or later, there is no point in getting Server - all of the features you’re likely to care about (e.g. Time Machine server) have been deleted and/or moved into the base macOS installation.

I also did that math; USB 2.0 is the bottleneck, even with smaller 5400 RPM drives. Yet, subjectively, it has been my experience that while it makes little difference for the intiial backup, subsequent incremental backups get through the “Preparing…” phase more quickly with an SSD, and that if your backups include numerous small files (e.g. a Mail or Outlook database), the SSD performs better as well.

With that said, I did not do any formal measurements or comparisons of SSD vs HD with an AirPort Extreme, especially with a high-performing hard drive like you describe, and there may be less difference than I imagine. My guidance here is based only on my impressions.

Fortunately, Paragon makes a $15 Mac utility called ExtFS

Where is it available at that price? On the Paragon page it’s listed at $39.95. I also checked whether there was a discount for TidBITS subscribers, but none is listed.

This particular model of Asus router requires the storage drive to be formatted with the older (but still adequate) Linux Ext3 file system, which it can do via its Web-based interface.

One can format an SSD in Ext4 on an Asus router, though admittedly it’s not for everyone. I managed it without any difficulty by following the excellent post: How to partition bigger than 2TB disk with GPT and ext4. I’m running Time Machine on it and it’s been rock solid.

Actually…I’ve concluded that TM over the network is simply unreliable and basically useless for laptops that don’t have the drive plugged in all the time. I’ve tired to set it up at least 3 different times for our two laptops under various macOS versions back to Mojave and despite building the shares on the destinations exactly identically to each other and setting TM up identically…it just randomly fails to find the destination or doesn’t finish the backup.

After that…I rolled my own solution using CarbonCopyCloner and using the destination option of Remote Mac after creating a share for each laptop on both my late 2014 mini and 2019 iMac. I set the CCC jobs for daily and alternating between the two destinations…and they’ve worked perfectly for months. And best of all it’s a Finder readable backup instead of a .dmg file and the Safety Net function in CCC. I did setup TM with a spinning OWC drive that only periodically gets plugged in so that the automatic hourly local TM backups would happen in case I need to recover something…that won’t protect as well against a total drive failure as TM would but at least I know the backups work. I also have a pair of Samsung T7s setup for full disk clones automatically when they’re plugged in and those jobs email to remind us to plug them in weekly. Everything really important either lives in iCloud, DropBox, or on the iMac which is also the house file server and it’s got BackBlaze on it for offsite backup as well as local CCC jobs.

My bad for not catching that. I’ve corrected the price now.

It’s a shame it was a mistake as I’d have bought it immediately at that price.

Amazing article! My takeaway is: Just plug a damn drive into the laptop.

Well, I have the WD MyCloud (Two Drive RAID) and have tried multiple times to use it as a Time Machine backup device for my MBP. Initially it works, but then after about a week or so, I get a message saying the backup is corrupted and I need to start over. I try again, and the same thing happens. Apparently the Sparse Bundle created to hold the backup is very fragile. I have now switched to CCC for backups - they strongly recommend against using a NAS for backups, and specifically recommend against the WD MyCloud device. I have CCC working now (without the snapshot functionality) on the WD MyCloud - but WD pushed out a firmware update to the device, and my CCC backups failed. This is not a good solution. I have considered just getting a MBA, connecting a SSD and using that, but the expense exceeds the value.

You could still use the Time Capsule in this case, if the network has a spare ethernet port. You could switch the Time Capsule wifi off, optionally.

Is it a My Cloud, or a My Cloud Home? The latter is a totally different product, inside and out. I haven’t seen that degree of corruption and unreliability with the My Cloud Home, at least with the single drive unit.

MyCloud Mirror. Two drives in RAID configuration. It has the new OS5 software.

Disappointing to hear your experience. I haven’t used that product.

The My Cloud Home is a very different beast, with different software than all other My Cloud models. It does not run My Cloud OS at all. It’s performed ok for network Time Machine in the various places I’ve installed it, except for one where I suspect the unit is defective.

That said, its primary virtue and the reason I included it is that it requires zero configuration for network Time Machine, not that it’s a best of class device. If one doesn’t mind configuring a NAS, I’d opt for a Synology over the My Cloud Home.

I have lost too many files during my computing life, some of them valuable projects that cannot be reconstructed. I have always tried to maintain a stringent backup regime, but sometimes events overtake you, like the time when all external drives started failing catastrophically in very quick succession at a time of zero available funds.

I have looked at all kinds of configurations and for now have ended up with the following configuration for my M1 MBP 13":

Power is provided over an OWC three-way TB4 switch so only one TB cable to attach. The switch connects my MBP to three WD USB-3 12TB harddisks. Nr 1 is for the Time Machine backup. Nr 2 is for user data, mostly media files like movies, books etc (but also iOS and iPadOS iMazing backups) that far exceed the MBP’s 2TB internal storage, some 6TB in total at the moment. Nr 3 is the clone from Nr 2, updated by ChronoSync each night. Besides all of that, Backblaze is running in the background.

Time Machine backups are notably fast. The media storage is just there and its cloning is unobtrusive.

I use DriveDX for drive monitoring.

In all it isn’t perfect, but hopefully it will go some way into the future.

On a side note: I never automatically restore a machine from a full backup. I do a clean install and then reconstruct my account manually. Therefore I use DAS for my backups; no tinkering required for getting at my files.
eMail is in several clouds and will sync from there. Passwords will sync from my iCloud keychain and a few password managers. Photos, music, Safari data etc sync from iCloud. Reinstalling a machine anew is relatively easy this way. Avoiding reintroducing the crud a system inevitably accumulates over time is worth it.

This seems like an overly convoluted approach with regards to restoring. Despite Time Machine’s many quirks, I’ve found restoring over the network (preferably wired) to work very well. You can easily choose the Time Machine network share as a source from Recovery or during install with migration assistant. This seems a lot less janky Than trying to connect the network storage device directly to your Mac.

My current setup is a TrueNAS Mini running three 14 TB drives in a RAIDZ (single failure tolerance). This provides plenty of space to back up all my family’s Macs to the same destination, and also some Windows systems as well

That said, I’ve found network Time Machine backups do not scale well. As the images get bigger, they are slower to mount and unmount, and they inevitably seem to end up with some sort of corruption that requires rebuilding the backup.

My solution is to only back up the system configuration with Time Machine. I exclude all my user data. Basically applications and settings only. For user data (Documents, Music, Photos, etc), I use Carbon Copy Cloner and back up everything directly to my NAS device’s filesystem. ZFS is great for this as it has very flexible character and pathname support, and supports large file extended attributes, so Mac extended attributes can all be preserved as native ZFS attributes - even legacy Resource Forks. This is extremely fast and I don’t have to deal with any of the weirdness of using disk images on a network share.

Once a week, my TrueNAS box copies everything to BackBlaze B2 storage (including Time Machine disk images) using Duplicacy.

I also leverage ZFS snapshots - the backup volume is snapshotted daily. This is something I highly recommend because it helps avoid the situation where you go to restore only to find your Time Machine disk image became silently corrupt at some point in the past. This is easy to set up with TrueNAS, and also with Synology if you’re using btrfs.

In a total restore situation, I would first restore the Time Machine backup using the transfer data option during a fresh macOS install, than copy over the user data with Carbon Copy Cloner.

Yep…that’s one of the errors I kept getting…hence my move to my own CarboyCopyCloner solution.

So many disadvantages to the My Cloud Home that it would not be an attractive option for me. I did go to the WD Support Site and they have a support document (Answer ID 977) that shows the differences between My Cloud and My Cloud Home. Interesting in that it shows My Cloud Home as using OS 4. And it shows both My Cloud and My Cloud Home as supporting Time Machine backups. I know it doesn’t work on My Cloud Mirror which is what I have.

Actually, I think I will go back to connecting an external SSD each night for an overnight CCC backup. It’s not a lot of trouble - I just keep forgetting to do it! It is much easier to restore from the attached SSD. (I don’t have a need for frequent backups on my MBP 16 Max - the stuff I really care about is in iCloud.) My iMac Pro is connected to an external SSD also for CCC backups.

The My Cloud Mirror does work well for file storage (my photos) and is available for all devices connected to my local WiFi network.

Very interesting article - the first I have seen that really goes into detail on NAS used for backups.

David

That’s what I do, and CCC can remind you to–but only if you choose the “Run on disk appearance” option.

If the iMac Pro is on all the time…just create a share on it named Laptop or something and then set CCC to that as the destination using the Remote Mac option under destination…then the backups will happen even if the machine is asleep. I don’t do that one hourly, just daily, due to transport time and I o ly backup /Users since the rest of the boot drive gets periodically backed up to a Samsung T7 that gets plugged in weekly. If you e got a TM destination set but the drive is t plugged in, the laptop will still do local hourly TM backups to itself for in between recoveries if necessary.

I turn it off when I am not using it. The MBP stays on all the time. I thought about buying a refurbished MBA and using that as an always on “file server”. But that is too expensive and too complicated. I already have three Macs in a house with two people…

David

This is a very interesting solution, both in the segregation of Time Machine components and CCC components, as well as using ZFS to store Mac-originated files, which is not something I would have conceptually trusted enough to even try. The fact that even resource forks survive seems remarkable to me, but I guess speaks to the versatility of that file system. Are you using AFP or SMB with it?

As for restoring – in 90% of the situations I’m helping with, restoring over Ethernet isn’t viable; think iMac and modem on opposite sides of a (non-wired) home, or MacBook with misplaced Ethernet adapter, etc. So for a full restore, it’s all night and crossed fingers over Wi-Fi if direct attachment isn’t an option. But what became clear to me when I was looking at the various options is that one size does not fit all, and if you’ve got a setup where you’re confident when it comes to network restore, and the benefits of a file system like ZFS outweigh those of directly attachable storage, then sure, that’s the right setup for you. However, even setting wired vs. wireless aside, I’m not sure that a system like TrueNAS is accessible for everyone (and a prebuilt unit ain’t cheap), and even as a consultant, I prefer to deploy broadly supported solutions for my clients in case I’m not available to help in a moment of need. But your solution sounds robust; thanks for sharing it.

Just to be perfectly clear, I don’t think the My Cloud Home is some kind of amazing product that I suggest you switch to, especially if you want to use it for network file storage. It’s adequate and super easy for network Time Machine, but that’s all I can say about it. And, thank you for correcting me regarding the OS – regardless, its variant of the My Cloud OS is certainly very different from all the other My Cloud products, much to the consternation of many of the people who purchased it, expecting a NAS in the vein of previously released My Cloud models.

I’m glad to see what I was hoping would emerge in the comments – different ideas about the best way to address a common need.

I understand - I think you made the limitations clear. The fact that you can’t create file folders and use it (conveniently) for file storage was a problem - and the idea that you have to connect as “Guest” without being able to secure the data with a password was really bad (you noted that the TM database should be encrypted). Also, apparently it is exposed to the internet by default - I have that turned off for my WD NAS - too risky. I could live with a TM backup only - but it seems too risky. And Mike Bombich of CCC specifically says to avoid the My Cloud Home device - apparently he has lots of customers who have tried to use it with no success.

The article is a nice overview of NAS backup - but my conclusion would be Don’t do it!

David

Unless you have an old Apple Time Capsule or connect the drive directly to your Mac, the Time Machine feature over a network is basically unreliable. I never could find anything that would reliably over a network with the same features (backup verify and disk repair), so I bought a few extra Time Capsules to keep in service. Time Capsules just worked. There are of course other solutions but none are as good as Time Machine.

If you have an old time capsule, you may want to replace/upgrade it’s HDD.

Here are some iFixit links to various models of Time Capsule so you can review the procedure. It doesn’t look too complicated, but some models have some delicate cables you need to be careful about not damaging.

Once you replace the drive, you need to format it in the Time Capsule. According to this article, you do that using the AirPort Utility.

For some reason, Apple supported using a drive connected to an AirPort Extreme for Time Machine
for only the last model of the AirPort Extreme. If you were using a prior model of the Extreme, however, you could still select the drive in Time Machine, and it seemed to work.

Like others, I found backing up my MBP to the AE’s disk to be flaky at times. In contrast, the iMac, which backed up to the same drive, rarely had a problem. I suspect the problem was caused when I would close the lid of my MBP during the middle of a backup. Usually Time Machine and the AirPort Extreme could handle that, but occasionally, it would result in a corrupted backup. The problem seemed to go away in later versions of macOS after I set Time Machine to run only when my MBP was plugged into power.

About a year ago, I received a Synology NAS as a Christmas gift, and I use it now for backing up with Time Machine. (Well, at least I do with the iMac. Time Machine doesn’t work on my M1 MBP running Monterey.) One advantage of the Synology over the AE is that it can do a lot more than just provide access to storage over the network. For instance, I use mine as a Plex server, an OpenVPN server, and a Channels DVR server.

But the Synology RT2600ac DOES support Time Machine under SMB! I have had 3 computers making Time Machine backups to my RT2600ac for a year now. Since the MR2200ac runs the same OS, I would guess that it too DOES support Time Machine (I use them only for mesh networking).

However, the documentation is just plain wrong, and the setup is counter-intuitive: Under “Mac File Service/Enable Mac file service/Time Machine:”, change “Time Machine:” from Time Machine (which seems logical) to Windows (which does NOT seem logical, since Windows does not support Time Machine nor vice-versa), and voilà!

Does that change your calculus of solutions?

Great tip! Who knew that this works with SRM. The UI would suggest anything but. (Certainly a different experience from DSM 7.0, which is straightforward in terms of what you might expect). I sent back my MR2200ac, so I can’t verify, but, based on your report, I don’t think it would change my calculus much, at least for the MR2200ac, because the performance was still weak.

Generally speaking, I think router-as-network-time-machine solution can certainly make sense if you need a new router anyway, and the one you choose performs well (I felt I could only sustain so many Amazon returns, so I didn’t make an exhaustive survey of this category). Or if you’ve already got one that has the feature. But if you’re already happy with your router (e.g. if you already have an Eero mesh or whatever), then I’d probably veer towards one of the other solutions.

As I have mentioned a few times on other threads, a big plus for Time Machine is its ability to alternate backups between several drives. It even reminds me when I forget to connect an off-site backup drive from time to time. I am disappointed that Apple dropped the Time Capsule but other drives are working well for me (touch wood!)

Yep…which is exactly why I have my roll your own CCC jobs alternating destination between the two Macs on my network that are always on.

This is an extremely helpful article, that is very timely for our household, after spending a whole weekend restoring a MBP from an old Time Capsule, and looking for better solutions in the future. We eventually had to archive the TC to another drive over USB-2 to get Migration Assistant to work. However, I would like to ask whether anyone understands why Apple has abandoned the Mac community in this way. I understand them not wanting to make Time Capsules any more, but surely they could have licensed other manufacturers to create equivalent products that don’t require arcane knowledge of file systems or network protocols? Is the market for Mac-compatible NAS backups so small that there is no commercial opportunity here? Is there a danger perhaps of Apple dropping Time Machine altogether in favor of iCloud sync’s?

I just noticed that my Asus ZenWiFi AT-8 mesh network supports the Time Machine for disks attached via the USB port of the router. You need to turn on the support via the system’s web interface USB section (not the mobile app support), but the process looks pretty easy. If you considering a stand-alone router or mesh system from ASUS, you can check to see if there is Time Machine support by looking at the USB Application section of the specs for a router from ASUS’s web page.

There already was a lot of competition in the market for routers and backup storage equipment, but nothing that added it all together in a way that was super easy to set up and use. When Time Capsule was introduced, it was a totally new, easy to implement and an extremely innovative product. It followed the recent introduction of iPhone, and iMac was still relatively new. Steve Jobs was already laser focused on wireless communications and secure networking for all Apple devices. He realized that Apple users and prospective consumers and business would welcome easy to set up and maintain WiFi networks. He also stressed privacy and security; IIRC, it was another unique selling point for Time Capsule.

The strategy behind Time Capsule was like the strategy for LaserWriter, which was developed because nobody at Apple or Adobe could convince printer manufacturers that there would be a business or consumer market for any personal computer, including anything DOS. Once comparable printers hit the markets at much lower prices than LaserWriters, Apple exited the market. Strategic planning such as this is why and how Apple became the first, second and third three trillion $ company in the world.

A similar argument could be made for dropping wireless routers, once mesh networks became cheaper to buy and easier to set up. But this whole thread shows that the analogy doesn’t work for wireless backups. There are no alternatives on the market. You can’t go to an Apple Store and buy third-party replacements because none exist.

I should have mentioned that Time Capsule has also been competing with cloud backups and storage in the business and consumer markets for many years now. I’m sure that iCloud is a gazillion times more profitable for Apple than Time Capsule ever was or could ever hope to be. And the storage market is flooded, and hard drive storage is really suffering. The scenario for hard drives is likely to get a lot worse a lot sooner

But they don’t market iCloud as a destination for Time Machine backups. Basically though you are saying that Apple doesn’t care about the user experience for Mac owners as long as they persuade enough of us to keep buying laptops. That may be true, but it is also depressingly cynical. Steve Jobs wanted the entire experience of owning a Mac to be insanely great, but we seem to have lost that vision forever.

I’ve got my 2012 iMac on a shelf serving as the Time Machine server (and other important uses), with internal backup drives mounted in a 2-slot OWC “toaster” drive adapter. I rotate a number of drives through, with some offsite. As noted in the article, this only requires Mac OS X High Sierra or later.

I found a different Apple support article on this than David C. above,–this one suggests setting SMB.

I do get occasional errors when the backup fails to complete, but these are transient, and subsequent backups are ok. Why yes, Adam, I do verify my backups by restoring something on International Verify Your Backups Day as you recommend, and other times. Networked TM is a lot less painful than when I kept a drive connected to the Mac, and was continually waiting with the Finder frozen for 5 seconds when the drive had to spin up.

There are concerns about Time Machine that you can read about in Take Control of * books, and I do clone from time to time.

Frankly, I think the time capsule was just a victim of Apple deciding not to continue to offer wifi routers. Apple continues to decide that it’s better to concentrate on specific product lines, ones I assume that are profitable to them, and likely decided that maintaining wifi router hardware and software wasn’t worth the effort anymore.

You can connect any external disk to a Mac to use for Time Machine and I’m sure that’s what Apple would recommend going forward.

Which is a little surprising at this point.

I suspect that Mac backups just would not be profitable for Apple. That would be, on average, much more data than iPhones and iPads. It’s still lame that Apple isn’t providing a good solution here.

Yes, but to me the big advantage of a Time Capsule is that it can be connected to my router, which is always connected to my MacBook Pro via Ethernet, thus saving a port.

Also, compared to other drive enclosures with fans – and even some fanless ones – the Time Capsule is really, really quiet. Mine sits on my desk about 30 inches away from me and at that distance is completely silent. (I have to put my ear within about six inches to hear it at all.)

It’s just data, and Apple charges for data. Apple could add a 4 TB tier to iCloud Drive, or introduce a new iCloud Mac Backup service that would offer unlimited data and be priced to account for the average size of Time Machine backups.

So the question becomes, how much would Apple need to charge to make it profitable while still offering a price that was compelling to users and competitive with services like Backblaze?

Yes, but to me the big advantage of a Time Capsule is that it can be connected to my router, which is always connected to my MacBook Pro via Ethernet, thus saving a port.

I understand the advantages, particularly to consumers. Just pointing out the disadvantages to Apple, which is probably why they’ve stopped. Continuing to support a product that isn’t moving lots of windows consumers to Mac just probably isn’t worth it, and it’s one less thing to support.

I think that’s because they primarily focus on iCloud for storing content. Apple would have to charge users a hell of a lot more money to back up everything on a Mac in iCloud, and it would cost them a lot more to build out the service. It probably isn’t profitable enough at this point. I think this will change in the future.

Well, they already provide the ability to store your Documents and Desktop folder contents in your iCloud account. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to extend that so it backs up your entire home directory and any app installations that didn’t come from the App Store.

Billing you, of course, for the storage used by all this data.

I was actually intrigued by the Asus mesh Wi-Fi products – they were highly rated in one review I read the other day, after this was published. If you give this a go, I’d be interested in how well it performs. I’ve generally been an Eero fan, but better performance (allegedly), multigig LAN, built in network Time Machine support, and non-data-mining-company ownership might make it an attractive system for those choosing among mesh options.

My original complaint was not that Apple haven’t solved this for us, but that they haven’t made any efforts to persuade third-party manufacturers to fill the void. They boast of companies producing HomeKit-compatible products, presumably because it provides another rationale for buying Apple devices. Why don’t they license TM-compatible products for the same reason? It wouldn’t even cost them any money - they could probably charge manufacturers for providing technical support when developing their products.

Strongly agree with this. Pretty much every third party product that exists is rolling their own, as a secondary feature for a NAS, enabled by what Linux enthusiasts have reverse engineered.

A Mac-centric vendor like LaCie (or anyone, really) could make a pretty good dedicated purpose network Mac backup product, or line of products, with Apple’s support, and I’d be telling every client to buy one.

He wanted that in the 80’s. In 1996, before he was running the show again, he said to Fortune “If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it’s worth — and get busy on the next great thing.” Well, he did exactly that. Apple in 2022 makes ultraportable, easy to use, always-connected computers called iPhones, and the Mac product line is a legacy business that exists largely to support the iPhone business, and reap halo effect revenues from it. I think today’s Apple certainly still cares enough about the Mac to want to keep it competitive, but its priorities lay with iPhone.

And iPhones get automatically backed up to iCloud. Even if you have a terabyte of data. Or two terabytes on an iPad.

Because Apple has many very stringent requirements for HomeKit, and developers have to be certified before they even get started:

The whole development, manufacturing and is strictly regulated, and developers and manufacturers need to be approved. There are guidelines even for interfaces. HomeKit final products go through an extensive testing process before they are finally approved and certified to be sold.

Apple does not certify third party hard drives:

Like I mentioned before, Apple developed and sold LaserWriters until the market was flooded with equally high quality printer models that were selling for much less. The profits were no longer there. It’s the same old story here.

I agree with David. And add…Apple doesn’t want to invest in wifi networking or backup solutions. TimeMachine is all we get.

, first with iOS, Apple has hedged that users will pay a flat fee to save (and share) their photos. Then with iCloud, their documents, contacts, desktop (Oh how many times did the MacOS upgrade fool your users to put their desktop and documents in the iCloud?). This is why, there is no more Time Capsule. And when you spec out $399 for a 2TB Time Capsule (discontinued), versus $120/yr for 2TB iCloud+ plan (and Hide email, relay, homekit video) just a matter of time when they offer 3, or more TB storage for $14.99/$19.99 month… Apple wants monthly income. And its getting it with AppleTV+. iCloud+, iTunes and iOS plans. And rightly so, for most, its ideal. And if they have internet, it should just work. Restoring? Bah, let’s talk about getting a new mac!

Solutions some of you offer are simple (WD My Cloud has some software issues, reliability and likely WD green or blue drives…I don’t trust them-anyone crack one open?). Others solutions are expensive (TrueNAS, Synology NAS, MacMini headless with Ministack or external storage via Tbolt/USB-C) or too difficult for average user. But…ZFS is the way. Not cheap, but man, the storage volumes …

I just read on the Asus Mesh/wifi 6 Router RT-AX86U that nothing is mentioned on Time Machine support, and any USB storage drive has a 2TB limit. One might want to check with Asus since it hasn’t updated its Time Machine Support document since 2019. I won’t recommend since I’m not familiar. I’m stuck with Orbi, and on my LAN, have a 2013 Time Capsule that I replaced the 2TB HDD with enterprise-grade 4TB HDD. (oh, I also own CCC 6.0.5 and under Catalina, clone my main SSD weekly to internal HDD on an old 2012 Macmini…that may have future as TimeMachine share box…always have that option!)

So… I recommend most use a cloud service (Code42, BackBlaze, etc) as secondary, with a USB-C external, as primary TM drive, to attach as needed (if users have portables). It doesn’t fit everyone, but for most, its least worry. Many I dealt with that are Mac Only, have moved to iCloud+, along with a Time Machine backup to USB-C drive they “schedule-a-reminder” to attach with portables. With desktop, it stays attached. Remember, external USB-C drives (HDD are larger than the SSDs, but SSDs are faster to restore from/backup to) are cheap. I mean, under $70 for 2TB.

Apple really showed their cloud plans when they discontinued wireless LAN (Time Capsule and Airport Express) products forcing most to other brand routers, along with Apple Music, AppleTV+, iCloud+, iOS Photos subscriptions.

Would it have been awesome and innovative if Apple sold a HomePod+ that was Wifi 6 mesh with HomePod Mini+ as Access points/Mesh repeaters, and the main unit, a speaker/router and had optional 2TB/4TB M.2 sticks inside, and could backup to HomePod+ iCloud plan?
We know that would never happen .

Note: we could debate backups forever. And there are dozens of alternatives, both local and cloud. But I think we can agree, Apple removed a prime solution for user to have easy, local, backup. Atleast Time Machine is included and works for most, and allows migrations to new macs. Let’s hope they don’t offer some TimeMachine+ as the only future solution…

ASUS provides horrible looking documentation when you dig deep. I believe that they may be bad translations from the original Japanese. Anyway, there is a later version from 2020 of the 2019 Time Machine documentation. From CNet, here’s an article, written when Apple discontinued the Airport line of replacement routers, with several of them able to use an external disk for the Time Machine. I suggest looking at currently available routers from the appropriate manufacturers to see if they would fulfill the requirements of the original poster.

By the way, I recently obtained a 2TB SSD to back up my 1TB laptop and plan to use the snapshot feature of CCC to replace the Time Machine.

As mentioned earlier one can format drives of more than 2 TB in ext4 on most ASUS routers. Such a USB attached ext4 formatted HD drive on my ASUS RT-AX86U has now provided rock solid Time Machine service for two laptops for months (I never had that reliability with either a Time Capsule or an Airport Extreme).

However one thing that likely has helped is that I don’t use the stock ASUS firmware but the Merlin firmware.

Re: networked Airport AC with ext drive.

You can perform the initial backup with the drive attached directly to a Mac and then select the backup it creates, once it’s plugged in to the Airport AC.

Downside with the AirportAC-extHD is that it is often unable to connect and you have to restart the Airport. However, I’ve found that powering the Airport via a simple mains-adapter-timer, so that it is powered off/on during the night, solves this issue to a large extent. TM caters to sudden loss of connection, so it’s not been an issue for me. I’m fairly sure that this is a network address issue and restarting gives it a new address, which is fine until it’s not.

Re: My Cloud Home.
I bought one for backups from Amazon some years ago. It was a disaster. Totally unreliable and I had to send it back. I reckoned it was just not made for Mac. Perhaps that’s changed since?

Re: Networked Mac
I used this for years, with an old ethernet attached Mini, in a fireproof safe in the basement. It worked flawlessly and being over ethernet, was actually quite fast. I managed it via Remote Desktop, which was occasionally a bit awkward and once or twice I had to remove it and attach it to a monitor to manage some settings. I also used it for Chronosync backups, which worked flawlessly via their Chronosync Agent software. Any old Mini should work, or an old portable, which would be easier with having a monitor that can just be turned down/off for most of the time.

Also NB, that Mac portables keep a backup locally. So recently changed files are available and very fast to load. There is also ‘versioning’ in apps like Pages, which is part of the TM system. Very cool.

I have Chronosync backing up all of my various drives and content areas, either mirroring drives onto each other or onto my WD PR4100. I have Time Machine set to backup on that WD raid, it’s working flawlessly, but my main tool is Chronosync, so versatile and useful.

While not a complete solution…and I agree that Time Machine on a laptop really needs to be via wifi and not via plugging in the drive since it’s a laptop…when one finally just acknowledges that TM over wifi to a .dmg file on a TC or another Mac just doesn’t work properly…then if you do have another Mac that is always running just hang a drive off of there and create a share. Don’t use this for a TM network backup though…since it doesn’t reliably work…get a copy of CarbonCopyCloner and set it up to do the same thing that TM would normally do…and it just works.

I’m not saying that TM over wifi does not work for anybody…just that it is unreliable and fails for inexplicable reasons. For instance…my last attempt at trying it…I set up 2 different shares on my iMac that were configured and permissioned identically and set one laptop to use one share for TM and the other one to use the other share. All machines running up to date Monterey and both laptops are M1 models. The one for my laptop worked for a week and then broke. The one for my wife’s laptop worked fine for the initial backup but then failed with an error message that made no sense at all. The result was my CCC roll your own TM over wifi solution.

I’m interested in the CCC approach. I have a 10-year-old MacBook Air that we could leave plugged in somewhere. I think it can run High Sierra, which supports APFS, and it has a Thunderbolt 2 port, so with the right adapters, we could presumably connect it to a couple of backup drives. If we need to restore the whole system, does Migration Assistant work with CCC clones?

MA can directly copy back your data from a CCC clone.

https://bombich.com/kb/ccc6/i-want-clone-my-entire-hard-drive-new-hard-drive-or-new-machine

Yep…works fine for a locally attached drive while restoring…I haven’t tried to restore over the network since local is much faster. Reinstall macOS, run MA with the drive plugged in and pick the drive.

Great article but I needed a home lab in addition to NAS and at the time, FreeNAS / TrueNAS wasn’t all that great (much better now). If all you need is NAS storage and Time Capsule support, you should consider a TrueNAS solution as it is superior to the other small NAS solutions on the market. It can even run some things in a FreeBSD Jail container such as a Plex Media Server, UniFi Controller, HomeBridge, etc.

Here’s my DIY solution (technically overkill for most people):

Couple of Mini-ITX cases with 8-bay hot swappable drives on a backplane with two power inputs and two SAS connectors to hook up all 8 SATA drives to an LSI 8-way RAID card configured in JBOD mode. Using a Supermicro M11SDV-8C±LN4F which includes the AMD EPYC 3251 SoC, 8 Cores 16 Threads @ 55W. Includes heatsink with cooling fan. Can handle up to 512GB ECC RAM. 4 Gigabit Ethernet Ports plus one IPMI management port. Two USB 3.0 ports and 6 USB 2.0 ports and additional 4 SATA3 ports on the board.

Running Ubuntu Server 20.04.3 LTS, LXD 4.22 (Linux Containers), and ZFS file system across 8 HDD’s with a couple SSD’s for read/write caching and booting. LXD containers share the host system kernel so they run at near bare metal speed and can access the disks at full speed. LXD can run virtual machines for other operating systems but they run slower than native LXD containers due to the overhead of hardware virtualization.

I have many containers but one to emulate a Time Capsule. The container is minuscule because that’s all it really needs. It needs to boot a very minimal Linux server instance and it needs to load SAMBA and avahi-daemon and that’s it. 1 CPU core is allocated, 256MB’s of RAM (never needs to swap) and 3GB of storage is allocated to the container. Then I mounted a ZFS dataset into the container and the dataset is allocated a 4TB quota. This is where the Time Machine backups actually go. I run a job to periodically check ZFS for errors and report if there is a problem. I use smartmontools to monitor and alert me if an HDD is going bad. I use the OPENOID tool (bunch of fancy Perl scripts) to snapshot the ZFS dataset and rotate the snapshots as well as replicating to a second and third NAS server, one in my home and one in the corner of a data center offsite. I backup critical data files to Cloud services such as iCloud / OneDrive.

Been running for years without issues, need to replace the drives as they start going bad after about 5+ years. Probably build out a whole new rig when more than a few drives start failing. It runs rather quiet, consumes little in the way of electricity and is ridiculously reliable. ZFS is absolutely rock solid and extremely reliable.

Hot Tips: Make sure you use HDD’s that are designed for RAID and make sure those drives are not SMR drives. ZFS requires all the drives to be the same capacity. Avoid buying drives in batches where the serial numbers are sequential. If there is ever a factory defect you could end up with several failing drives. Watch out for WD Red Drives smaller than 8TB’s as they likely are SMR drives which can fail spectacularly in ZFS. If you use SSD’s you are going to need Enterprise class SSD’s or they are going to wear out rapidly in a RAID configuration. Enterprise class SSD’s have a lot more over-provisioning meaning they have a lot of extra flash sectors which are swapped out by the drives firmware as the sectors reach their maximum number of writes. If you are going to use SSD’s you should definitely setup 10GbE Ethernet or you won’t realize the full speed benefits over 1GbE networks. Still using HDD’s with SSD caching because SSD’s are still very expensive.

WD makes three different series of “Red” drives:

• The Red is SMR at all sizes. Any CMR models they made in the past have been discontinued.
• The Red Plus is CMR for all sizes
• The Red Pro is CMR for all sizes

In general, if specifications matter to you (and for your application, they absolutely matter), you must read the data sheet for the drive. Marketing material can suggest/imply/hint at all kinds of things but the data sheet will tell you the truth for each specific model sold.

Two points: First, time machine is much more than a “backup”, because it stores many snapshots from the past. Most of the time I use it not because my disk has crashed, but because I deleted a file or email I want to get back. (Good luck with email; it’s a nightmare to restore.)
Second, as many have pointed out, it works fine with an attached hard drive, so the problem is one of networking, or possibly time machine’s ability to handle interruptions.
I don’t really understand why TM needs so much complexity (including drive format) at the drive end. Of course it doesn’t make any sense for apple to get into the drive business. Is it possible they (or someone) could re-write time machine so it would work reliably on a commodity network storage devices? Have the issues that cause the storage-side complexity changed since it was originally conceived?

Sure…it’s quite possible. In fact…Mike Bombich who used to work at Apple and left to start CarbonCopyCloner has already done so. It isn’t as simple to setup as TM…but it isn’t much harder and it actually works.

There’s also Chronosync. It was used years ago at a company I worked for, and I never heard any complaints.

Yeah…that works too I’ve heard but I don’t have any experience with it so don’t really know how it plays with network shares but I presume it works fine.

A few years ago, the HDD in my Airport Time Capsule started to fail. I bought a 4TB external drive and connected it to the USB port on the TC. ( It was supposed to be an interim solution until I found something better.) It has happily been backing up 3 laptops and a Mini and there it sits - I just haven’t bothered to implement another solution. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

Time Machine like Apple Mail and Preview- are limited PIA apps. Designed for users who just want plug and play out of the box with limited intelligent user experience. It’s the ‘duh’ school of thought.
I just have (redundancy) external drives (one NAS) and use CCC. Perfect- can backup and restore and/or migrate with no hassles. Apple wanted some sort of flashy space experience with Time Machine- but I have run into so many problems restoring other peoples computers. I send them down the Super-Duper and CCC roads and they are very satisfied.

A higher-end option worth considering would be a TrueNAS device, especially if you build it to be more than just a backup machine. (I’ve built one for my parents which is doing Time Machine for their two laptops, as well as running a media server.) Disks will also be on ZFS - which is more robust than any of the file systems listed in the article. (BTFS in theory is as robust, but in practice is not.)

You could also use just the software on your own lower-end or older hardware, to reduce the cost. Most PCs with 8GB of RAM or more would be fine to run it.

I went down the Raspberry Pi path, and to make my life easier used Open Media Vault 5.6 as the software distribution. This provides all the NAS features you would expect with a Web GUI interface. Using a single USB 3.0 drive and a pi4.

My experience (after 10 months of use)…compared to my old mini.

GOOD

• faster transfers than my old mini (was firewire now USB 3)
• wake up (from sleeping disc) much faster
• low power consumption (pi4 3W vs mini 11W-85W) no fans
• reuse old USB 3.0 enclosure
• significantly cheaper than a new NAS or mac mini
• flexible and easy to manage
• OMV is well documented, maintained and with active forums

BAD

• learning curve for linux, samba and raspberry pi
• power supply cable for raspberry pi is it’s biggest weakness (continuity can be lost if bumped or moved)

It is important to backup your Raspberry Pi boot volume, and I use a USB micro-SD card reader housing the backup volume. I backup prior to every software update.

This was a really useful article and it prompted me to look at my Time Machine configuration. However, most of the solutions were to complex for my capabilities, and only the Western Digital MyCloud option seemed appropriate. Of this, Ivan writes “Just set your Macs to use the My Cloud Home as a Time Machine destination, signing in as Guest when prompted for authentication. That’s it.” However, there is no mention of how to migrate an existing Time Machine archive to the new hard drive. Or am I missing something obvious.
I hope this post is appropriate – I have only just joined TBT

What a weird article. The author states that SMB is a key criterion and then goes on to review several possible solitons that don’t support SMB. He largely rules out NAS devices as being too costly, and then goes on to review a low end Synology unit, makes no mention of QNAP (the NAS maker I use whose operating system provides explicit support for Time Machine backups), or indeed other NAS makers, but does include a Mac Mini as a potential backup device (at a price that is significantly higher than most low end NAS units).

There does seem some confusion regarding file system formats. As the article explains network Time Machine backups use sparse files, So any product that provides a correct SMB interface is fine. The underlying file system isn’t important.

Great subject, great article, great comments so far.

Long time Time Capsule user. When my last time capsule died, I replaced it by external USB3 small size drives (without individual power supply) connected to an old network mac doing High Sierra located in the basement with my router and such. Piloted using screen sharing.

Drawbacks and associated questions:

(1) Is it really advisable to use SSD in this function. A long discussion was held on mac forums recently advising about the difficulty for a SSD to support the delicate carving of time machine. Any suggestion to defend the SSD in this role ?

(2) I failed to associate the network mac to the protection granted by the UPS to my router. Hence a short time after power failure, the backup dies suddenly when the UPS battery is drained empty and I found no way to associate the mac to the UPS : clean shut down of the mac and automatic restart of the mac upon return of electric power. Is this prudent ? Is there a cure ?

SSDs have no intrinsic problem with being a TM drive, whether now with APFS nor before with HFS+. The issue would be frequent read/writes cycles that could eventually reach the limit in certain areas (blocks of bits) as specified by the manufacturer on the SSD (can be only few thousand on inexpensive consumer grade SSDs).

So if you plan to use one TM disk forever, where old backups will eventually get purged to make room for new backups (i.e. bits get overwritten frequently), this could eventually indeed become a problem. However, if you follow the old adage of filling the drive up only until it has reached about 80% of its capacity and then you swap it for a fresh drive, there should be absolutely no problem with SSD or HDD. The difference is really just cost/GB, noise, and power.

Some people have warned that SSDs can die abruptly where there’s usually no advance warning. Note there is no guarantee of such advance warning with HDD failure either (although sometimes people get an indication the disk is about to fail through SMART warnings, etc.). Regardless of SSD or HDD, good practice to ensure this doesn’t bite you is to simply use multiple TM drives. Several disks can be assigned to TM concurrently. TM will use whatever it’s hooked up to at the time. In fact, if it’s been too long since it has seen a certain disk (10 days IIRC), it will even warn you and tell you which disk it should back up to again.

Disk docks (or SATA-USB adapters for SSDs) make swapping multiple drives straightforward. They offer little physical protection for the drive itself, but OTOH swapping becomes a 2-sec task. Very simple.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07B3S5FSF/
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B011M8YACM/

Can you take an SSD offline, erase it - or more - does it reset the “bit limits” so it can be used for another “few thousand" cycles?

I would be a bit concerned with this choice of hardware. Particularly:

• I don’t trust bus-powered drives to be reliable. The power delivered by a USB bus isn’t necessarily consistent or sufficient for a high powered drive. Especially if there is a hub involved. I always prefer external power for my backup drives (of course, since I prefer to use 3.5" HDDs, I couldn’t choose otherwise even if I wanted to).
• I’m always concerned about the reliability of pocket/portable drives for extended use scenarios. I think manufacturers try to cut costs wherever possible for these drives, and therefore don’t use the most reliable mechanisms.

I personally don’t see a specific problem with it. But I don’t see a particular reason why you should use an SSD either. Your backup device doesn’t have to be high performance - even with an HDD, each hourly backup (after the initial one, of course) should run just fine, even if it takes a little longer than it would on an SSD.

New Time Machine volumes (created on Big Sur or later) all use APFS, which is designed and optimized for SSD usage, so an HDD will experience a lot of head thrashing, but again, since this is not a high-performance scenario, it shouldn’t matter. Unless the sound of the head motion bothers you.

My personal opinion is that the lower cost-per-TB of an HDD is most important when choosing a backup device. Especially when you can buy/build HDDs with humongous capacities (4, 8, 10 and more TB), where an SSD of similar capacity would be prohibitively expensive.

Any decent UPS should support monitoring - typically via a USB cable. Connect it to the computer it is powering.

macOS will probably auto-detect this and add a “UPS” tab to the Energy Saver preference panel, which can be used to configure automatic shutdown. The main energy saver panel can be used to configure automatic restart after a power failure:

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No. It doesn’t work that way. The “write cycle” limit is the maximum number of times each physical block of flash memory can be erased and re-written This is a function of the hardware.

When a block exceeds its limit, it can no longer reliably store data. Any remotely competent SSD controller chip will detect this and take the block out of service when it happens (using other storage locations to hold its data).

The ATA spec includes a “secure erase” command which is supposed to completely wipe all the storage on an SSD. (I assume NVMe drives have a similar command.) This will make all previously-stored data inaccessible, but the specific mechanism is not defined by the standard and different manufacturers may implement it in different ways.

Because not all SSDs have a secure erase command (especially those connected via USB), and there’s no guarantee that every SSD implements it in a way that is truly secure, it is not considered a reliable solution for the general case. Instead, the best way is to encrypt the volume when you set it up. Later on, you can simply change or discard the key, which will make all the data inaccessible, no matter what the underlying hardware does.

Simply writing zeros to the entire SSD does not erase all the flash memory blocks. As a matter of fact, depending on the SSD controller, doing so may actually be a bad thing - creating lots of “garbage” that subsequently needs to be “collected” before the physical blocks are actually erased.

I found a solution that combined off-site backup with a resource I was underusing.

Over the many years of using TM I have maybe restored a file from a TM backup just a handful of times, so I regard TM primarily as a gold-standard method to restore the entire Mac in case of disaster.

I have a TM drive permanently connected to my OWC T3 Dock and M1 MacBook Pro to which I make regular manual backups during the day (such as during meals) as well as clones of the Data volume to an alternating pair of external drives with the excellent ChronoSync. I also make an additional TM backup to a drive stored in a fire safe once a week.

To address the off-site issue, a friend recommended an application named Arq (URL) which is capable of making backups to Dropbox. I have a 2TB plan but was only using a fraction of that for my clients so it was a perfect match. My broadband connection is not fantastic - 16 down and 6 up, but scheduled to run overnight, it gradually chomps its way through the gigs of data after which refreshing the backup is relatively light work. Restoring data is very simple.

Instead of backing up everything, I select top and 2nd-level folders from the MacBook Pro internal store and from other attached drives and setup separate backup plans in Arq to save the data to Dropbox. This has been working really well and the only additional cost was that of Arq, which is modest.

Arq sits in the background, doing its work quietly, efficiently and without fuss, just as all good software of this kind should do.

I use Arq for offsite backup as well (to Backblaze B2, and to AWA glacier for media files, and also to OneDrive, where I have 1 TB of storage that I hardly use otherwise), plus backup onsite to an external drive of another machine, which works as Time Machine does - thinned to daily, weekly, and monthly file versions. I’ve had TM several times inform me that its drive can no longer be used for backup, and needs to start over, but I can’t recall ever getting that message from Arq.

Of course Arq is not free but it is a great backup utility, and I know it’s been mentioned on these boards many times.

No. The process of “erasing” it and then rewriting to it later would just increase that read/write cycle count by one. You cannot undo read/write cycles on these disks. Think of it as wear and tear, and this cycle count is a wear level indicator. It only gets worse as time progresses and use increases.

Of course this is really only an issue for disks that see lots of read/writes (like a boot volume or scratch partition). If this is a TM backup and it gets swapped once it’s filled up, you’ll be fine.

Time Machine back to Synology NAS has worked for me. Of course you should always have more than one kind of backup.

long time listener, first time caller. Appreciate this article and all the knowledgeable comments.

I am trying the option with the 24/7 mac mini with a USB SSD connected devoted exclusively to be the TM drive for my Macbook Air.

I am following the directions in the linked Apple article but no matter how often I reformat the drive and retry it, I get an error when trying to select the SSD on the mac mini as a target. It shows up in my MbAir TM preferences as a viable target, but I get the following error:

“Time Machine Can’t Connect to the Backup Disk / There was an error authenticating with the provided username or password” even when using a known good username/password (that works through the Connect to Server dialog)

Any ideas?

That’s precisely the issue and error I kept getting. I would create two identical shares, one for each laptop with identical permissions. One of them would allow selecting as a TM destination…and the other wouldn’t. Eventually got both to work and they worked until they randomly failed.

At that point I rolled my own CCC solution but it only happens daily. I set up TM with a direct connected drive on both laptops but only plug it in every couple of weeks. The Davao having it set instead of TM off is tht the local TM snapshots keep happening so I can recover something from an hour ago if needed.

If you use the CCC option…make sure to use remote Mac as the destination instead of a mounted share…the latter didn’t work reliably if the laptop was asleep but the former just works.

Thanks Neil I have a similar CCC nightly backup as well, but I’d like to have the hourly versioning and ease of use of a functioning TM backup. Also redundancy.

I also use Arq via SFTP to the same Mac Mini (so it continues to back up when I travel) as well as a Hackintosh that lives in my parents basement across the country.

But I’d really really like to get TM over network. I hate attaching and unattaching the damn USB SSD drive throughout the day — it’s mind boggling that it’s 2022 and we still rely on that.

Thanks Simon. This leaves an issue open. Le 25 janv. 2022 à 16:45, David C. <[email protected]> a écrit :

jean_pierre_smith:

When my last time capsule died, I replaced it by external USB3 small size drives (without individual power supply) …

I would be a bit concerned with this choice of hardware. Particularly:

• I don’t trust bus-powered drives to be reliable. The power delivered by a USB bus isn’t necessarily consistent or sufficient for a high powered drive. Especially if there is a hub involved. I always prefer external power for my backup drives (of course, since I prefer to use 3.5" HDDs, I couldn’t choose otherwise even if I wanted to).
• I’m always concerned about the reliability of pocket/portable drives for extended use scenarios. I think manufacturers try to cut costs wherever possible for these drives, and therefore don’t use the most reliable mechanisms.

This leaves for me, unfortunately, open the question of only powering the backup drives when and if a backup is forthcoming or in progress. Why ? To save energy and in view of my old laCie Big being noisy event when its drives are unmounted.

If you’re replacing your old mechanical HDD with a new SSD you’ll already be saving quite heavily on power. If you want you can disconnect the drive when you’re not using it to force it to power off (probably makes more sense in terms of ransomware protection but whatever). If you prefer to leave it connected at all time, you can connect 2.5" drives through switched USB hubs such that you can actually turn off the individual USB port that drive is connected to. I’m not sure I trust those hubs a whole lot though and my suspicioon is their trickle currents (they like to come with lots of lights and bling) will likely outweigh the minute savings of powering off the already unmounted drive.

There are external cases 2.5" cases that offer their own power input ports so you don’t have to rely on bus power. I have never had an issue with bus power—using quality powered TB hubs or direct connections to Macs that is—but if added protection is your concern, one of these will do the trick. Obviously, you then need to supply it with a reliable quality power supply for this to really add to your protection.

As I’m sure everyone here who uses it already knows, CCC can be set for hourly backup too.

@neil1 I solved this by turning file sharing off and on on my mac mini 24/7 server with the TM target SSD attached. I relaunched the finder on My MbA for good measure. Backing up now. Who knows how long it will last, but small steps

Yeah…I had tried that too and it worked…for awhile but then it failed randomly again on one or the other of the two laptops…I finally decided that if TM over the network was that fussy and finicky it’s not really a good backup scheme at all…hence my roll your own scheme. The really strange thing was that since I was using 2 TM drives…one on my Mac mini and one on my iMac…for both of the laptops and the 4 shares were all set up the same which one broke randomly switched between the two destinations and even when TM said the drive was not available I could easily open up the share for that laptop…so how can it not be available/

Yep…but since for a laptop even the daily ones are multiple GB and I decided it wasn’t worth it to do hourly based on network bandwidth. I might go back and set them up for a couple of times per day though…I didn’t do that originally since the backups to my mini were to a spinning Seagate Backup+ drive and it only writes 20 or 30 MB/sec. Now that I’ve got an SSD on that machine for the shares it’s 10x that fast so even multiple GB backups aren’t really that long. The iMac which is my other destination is writing to a TB RAID so it’s plenty fast even through they’re spinning drives.

Huh, bandwidth point taken in some cases, but does a CCC backup interrupt work while it’s running? I don’t do them hourly and wouldn’t know.

It shouldn’t, although you may notice some CPU and disk usage as it runs (much like you do for Time Machine).

When making a backup of an APFS volume, CCC creates a temporary snapshot, and then it performs an incremental backup of the snapshot. So the backup will contain your drive’s content at the time the backup started (and won’t be affected by files you change while it is running).

V. cool, thanks, David

This is a really interesting point for M1 Mac users.

On Monterey we observe that TM runs exclusively on the E cores because it has been set to the lowest Quality of Service level (9). For non-Pro/Max M1s this also means it runs on E cores at their lowest frequency of 1 GHz, they will not ramp up to their 2 GHz peak clock for this thread (on the Pro/Max M1s if there are multiple threads at QoS level 9 [and ignoring things like i/o throttling in the case of backupd], the E cores will ramp up their clock to match the peak E performance of the regular M1 E cluster despite having only half the E cores in its E cluster). One really nice thing about this is that it means it’s very hard for the M1 user to notice TM is running at all—apart from perhaps i/o bottlenecks in certain special cases, whatever you’re actively doing and certainly all the GUI action is driven with priority over what TM is doing in the background. The one downside to this is that there is presently no known method for the user to elevate the QoS level (“promote” a thread using eg. taskpolicy) and get it to run on the P cores if, say for example you’re stepping away from your Mac from an hour and in the meantime you want that initial TM to run through. In such a scenario you’d want it to complete in minimum time rather than at minimum noticeable impact, hence you want the P cores to fire away. But that is something we cannot presently adjust (at least to our present knowledge).

How does CCC deal with this? What is it’s QoS level for its backup threads? If it’s set to higher values it could also run on P cores. The advantage this has is that indeed a user can force it back down to run on E cores (and even later select to return it to E cores) if you prefer the backup to run unnoticed instead of in minimum time, because taskpolicy, or rather the underlying setpriority() function, does indeed work in that direction. Does CCC expose any of this control to the user?

Here’s an example of such an option:

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Does anybody have the details on how CCC deals with this on M1?

I’m always on the lookout for interesting Raspberry Pi projects so I setup a Pi 3 as a Time Machine target for an M1 Mac mini. Its storage drive is a 500GB Samsung T5 SSD formatted as HFS+J. It uses Samba. It’s networked over wi-fi.

The Pi is running a, just released from beta, 64-bit version of Raspberry Pi OS Lite, a server edition.

The combination of the modest Raspberry Pi 3 hardware–1GB RAM, 1.2 GHz clock speed, USB 2.0–and wireless connectivity means that backups and retrievals are noticeably slower than those on my previous TM setup with a Thunderbolt-connected SSD. However, after its first few days the system is working reliably, if slowly.

In general, the answer is don’t bother migrating a Time Machine backup from an old drive to a new one. Just put the old one in a drawer in the highly unlikely event that you’ll need to go back to a version of a file that’s on it and not on the newly created Time Machine backup. Eventually, you’ll get bored of keeping it in the drawer and will reformat it and use it for something else.

Very good advice.

In fact, you cannot reasonably do this with TM to an APFS store anyhow because of the way APFS TM stores snapshots and the lack of user-facing ability to copy such snapshots. If you’re still using TM to HFS+, you could in principle clone your old HFS+ store to a newer drive and then use that (in fact a long time ago I did that myself). It works, but these days you don’t really want to be on HFS+ for TM anyway. Go APFS for TM and follow @ace’s advice when it’s time to move to a larger/newer TM drive.

Thanks, Adam. That’s really sensible advice. I’ll do it.

It would be an interesting test to see if you could do it with an image copy. Something like:

• Connect source and target drives. Make sure the target is equal to or larger than the source

• Make sure all volumes on both drives are unmounted

• Perform an image-copy from one device to the other. This should duplicate everything, including the partition table and all file system control structures. For example, if the source is /dev/disk8 and the target is /dev/disk9, you might type:

  $ dd if=/dev/disk8 of=/dev/disk9 bs=1m
  

• When completed, disconnect (or power-off) both drives. Then power-on the target. If the image-copy worked, you should see it mount and its snapshots should be available.

• Now use Disk Utility to enlarge the APFS container to fill the entire drive (assuming the new one is larger than the old one was)

Assuming this works, you will want to make sure you do not try to connect both the source and target drives at the same time, because they will have identical UUIDs and this may cause problems.

In theory, you should be able to use the internal /System/Library/Filesystems/apfs.fs/Contents/Resources/apfs.util command (type man apfs.util for its documentation) with the -s option to generate a new UUID for an APFS container, but I have no idea if it will actually work, nor do I know how/if it will affect the volume’s ability to work as a Time Machine volume. But if it fails, the worst that should happen is that you may have to re-duplicate the volume (which may take several hours for a large drive, of course).

Have working 2 TB Time capsule ethernet connected to my iMac running Catalina. Works fine but is full which is OK but does not allow adding a second computer…

Have new M1 MacbookPro running Monterey and will use 2 TB external SSD for backup using CCC. Is very fast but needs to be initiated manually.

Have 3 TB Time capsule that is unused. Any way to use it on the network (Uses Verizon Quantum router) for the M1 Macbook - connecting it to existing 2 TB time capsule or??

You can easily set this for auto initiation on a schedule or when the drive is connected if it’s not always so.

Thanks, but I( was not clear. The existing 2 TB is Ethernet connected direct to the router and works Erin for backing up my iMac (OS 11). I now have a new M1 Macbook that will connect by WiFi.

My question?, if I want to separately use my 3TB Time capsule for the WiFi connected M1Macbook (OS 12), can I just connect it to a LAN port on the 2 TB working Time Capsule and will the MI MacBook see it as a second Time capsule.? Am not sure even that Monterey Has Time capsule installed.

Thanks @IvanExpert for a really excellent article. It’s so useful to have these different options explained and evaluated, and has opened my eyes to some potential options for replacing my existing creaky network Time Machine backup.

@gordon589 mentioning that they use ZFS on their NAS made me wonder if this filesystem could be used with the Raspberry Pi+external drive backup solution. Would it then be possible to plug the external drive into a Mac for a restore? Can MacOS 12 Monterey read ZFS disks, or is there a driver available if not?

@curtis, are you saying that you are using an HFS+ Journaled disk attached to a Raspberry Pi? And it can read/write to it? In the article, @IvanExpert said HFS+ wasn’t an option with the Raspberry Pi because there are no Linux drivers for HFS+ that support journalling. But have you found one that does? That would seem to be the ideal solution.

After reexamining my procedure I think @IvanExpert is correct. My storage drive is HFS+ but it is NOT journaled.

On macOS, I erased and formatted the drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) using Disk Utility.

On Raspberry Pi, I installed the following additional packages:

• hfsprogs
• hfsutils
• hfsplus
• samba
• samba-common-bin

On Raspberry Pi, I attached the drive and checked its status:

sudo parted /dev/sda

Output:

GNU Parted 3.4
Using /dev/sda
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted)

I ran the following “parted” command:

(parted) print                                                            

Output:

Model: Samsung Portable SSD T5 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 500GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End    Size   File system  Name                  Flags
 1      20.5kB  210MB  210MB  fat32        EFI System Partition  boot, esp
 2      210MB   500GB  500GB  hfs+

Quit parted:

(parted) quit

parted reports the drive as HFS+ but not as Journaled. But as stated above, I formatted the drive HFS+J on macOS.

As I write, I’ve been backing up to my Raspberry Pi Time Machine target since Feb 3rd. I’ve successfully restored files over the network using the default macOS interface. My setup is working reliably.

Great article @IvanExpert

I’ve been using a Synology NAS over SMB, but for some reason since around the time of my Monterey upgrade (difficult to say exactly) Time Machine now says “Looking for backup disk” more often than it does a successful backup.

If I reselect the disk then the backup will proceed. But that negates the automatic backup feature!

Both the Mac and the Synology are connected using Ethernet to the same network.

Any ideas anybody?

Thanks to everyone who has commented here, and to the OP, for lots of good info. I will share my approach.

I have two machines to back up. I wanted to redo the system. My old system had a 4TB drive connected via hub to my main machine. I used a push from the other machine using Carbon Copy Cloner to that drive. It worked, but sometimes I would forget, unplug the laptop without ejecting the drives. More than once they became corrupted.

New approach. Really wanted a networked solution. But after reading everything here about NAS, and reviews on online shopping sites, and warnings from my employer’s data center about security issues with Qnap devices in particular, decided that they as a class are unreliable (for Time Machine anyway), not to mention expensive. I concluded that only Mac-to-Mac would be reliable.

I thought about getting a Mac mini and hanging it off my router. But a new is expensive for the intended use. I had an old (2011) MBP sitting on a shelf unused. I knew it wasn’t supported by modern OS versions, and was concerned about security. Then read an article about OpenCore Legacy Patcher (OpenCore Legacy Patcher) and decided to give it a try. I was pleasantly surprised that it actually works! Now have a fully patched Monterey 12.2.1 running. The GUI is slow; but only real downside is screen brightness stuck on high, but runs in clamshell w/o problem. Long story short, using as a target for both TimeMachine and CCC works just fine from both machines. If the machine dies, I will pick up a used Mac Mini for $200 or so and move on. OpenCore is pretty amazing. Takes some IT chops to go through the process, but it’s pretty well documented. Highly recommended.

Does this only happen when you boot the Mac? Many years ago I used to have to add a network drive to my startup items (in Sys Prefs/Settings) in order for Time Machine or other apps to use it after booting up.
My current configuration does not need this but you may have this issue.

Sadly not, my Mac is on 24/7.

Of course I did try a reboot but the issue prevails.

Annoying as it worked so well for so long.

There’s a utility named ConnectMeNow that automates 5is much better than an alias in Login items…because that one frequently disappears after sleep (the network volume, not the Login Items entry. Solves this problem nicely and you can easily mount or dismount volumes t startup, login, or as needed. It also remembers the appropriate name and password since connecting via Network in Finder defaults to the iCloud account rather than whatever user you really want to use.

This an interesting thread. Have been struggling with backing up the Apple M1 Mac for a while now. My main concern is ability to recover the iPhoto library, which is about 90GB (across 15 ish years). I have a Synology NAS connected. Backing up via Time Machine resulted in various failures and rebuilds over the last year. After the going through the thread, I am going to split up the backup of the M1 into User data (Pictures, Music, Movies) using CCC vs. everything else via Time Machine. Both to back up to the Synology NAS.

Question. CCC has this notification that system files are skipped during backup the NAS. How do I know that the iPhoto library has system files? I can’t find an indication that iPhoto library has system files somewhere, It would be great if the CCC of iPhoto on the NAS is sufficient to recover to the M1 if needed, and do not have to also include iPhoto in the Time Machine backup. Hope that someone can share their experience

None of your user files (such as your photos) or settings are affected by that. CCC is warning you that it will not do a complete “clone”, as in back up everything the way we used to. Nowadays, it will not copy over files that belong to macOS itself (/System) as such items that are recreated on the fly when you install a fresh copy of macOS on your M1 or when you choose to install a fresh macOS over an existing installation.

Note that those macOS items CCC is not backing up are part of the SSV in Big Sur and Monterey, that is, they are mounted as read-only during boot. Nothing you do as a user (saving data, installing apps, setting prefs) affects those parts anyway, so they don’t have to be backed up. macOS installers (and Recovery) will provide those parts when needed. And that’s why it makes sense for CCC not to back up those. And because this is rather different from the way things used to be (pre-Catalina) and the way they used to be backed up, CCC is letting you know about it.

I had a little improvement disabling power nap. But my issue prevails.

Thanks for the tip. I’ll try it!

Link:

Sadly ConnectMeNow does not help with my “Looking for Backup Disk…” issue.

I’m having a little more success deactivating Time Machine automatic backups and instead using TimeMachineEditor with some additional options.

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Speaking of auto backups…as I’ve said before I gave up on network TM and rolled my own with CCC since the former doesn’t work reliably. However…I also wanted to get local hourly snapshots but the only way I could do that was to setup Tm to a USB drive and then unplug the drive. That works so I can recover a file I deleted yesterday more easily if need be…but then TM keeps nagging me that it hasn’t backed up in xx days.

So…is there a way to get local only snapshots hourly without enabling TM? I will have to look and see if CCC will do that but is there another way to do this?

TimeMachineEditor, see above.

Thanks Matt…I was going to give that a try and see if it would do the trick but figured you would be able to answer the question for me. Downloaded and I’ll check it out.

I just checked the WesternDigital support site and as of the firmware 7.16.0-217 the My Cloud Home device no longer uses AFP for TimeMachine but instead requires that you use SMB connections for TimeMachine backups. My Cloud Home: macOS Time Machine Error "Backup Disk Not Available"

Howard Oakley just summarized his findings on the topic. Interesting high-level statement:

Any of the NAS systems I reviewed would make an excellent replacement for a Time Capsule.

More below.

It’s a shame he’s dancing around the information because the review is only in print.

And also that he didn’t test for more than one initial backup and one update backup, so he didnt encounter the “looking for backup disk…” problem.

I’m having a bit more luck with the combination of TimeMachineEditor and ConnectMeNow.

Article is available Apple News+ FWIW. It was so techy, and as I already have a Synology, I skimmed through it.

I read the article in a newsagents whilst on the road. The top reviewing unit was an Asustor Drivestor 2 Pro AS3302T which was awarded 5/5 stars. The full article is here: MacFormat - 04/2022 - page 84

imgur mirror of article: https://imgur.com/gallery/j7bkJc1

In other news, my Time Machine backups to Synology NAS are faultless for me now with the combo of TimeMachineEditor and ConnectMeNow. Such a relief.

My Synology is so old it won’t get any more updates so nothing has changed there. So it occurred to me that perhaps macOS 12.3 fixed the problem? I don’t have the desire to risk breaking m y working setup by checking.

Hi Ivan. Many thanks for this article & apologies if this set-up has already been discussed in the Q&A thread: I am attaching my external drive to an old Time Capsule. So the external drive is doing the Time Machine backups, and the old Time Capsule is what connects to the router. Is this set-up sound? I’ve just bought a SanDisk Professional 6TB G-DRIVE, 7200 RPM Enterprise-Class to replace the WD My Passport drive I have been using (another story for another thread on the problem I was faced with this one).

Replying to Alan Forkosh re Asus routers. I have a ZenWiFi AC mesh and am trying to attach a hard drive to the USB port to use as Time Machine. However, (1) the Zen only ‘sees’ the drive when attached to the main node not the remote node, (2) the disk status does not give any details (see attached), and (3) the Asus Time Machine functionality doesn’t have a path to the drive.
Notably, if I attach an SSD it works fine but I am not going to spend the $$$$ for an SSD with sufficient capacity to backup my system.
Do you have any experience attaching a hard drive to Asus? Thank you.

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Sorry, I haven’t actually played with attaching anything to the USB port.

Thanks. I can’t find anything on line other than connecting an SSD and the Asus help is pretty useless.

In case anyone is interested, Mike Bombich (Carbon Copy Cloner) finds NAS backups to be slower and less reliable:

https://bombich.com/kb/ccc6/choosing-backup-drive

Interesting. i can’t say I’ve ever noticed either of those things.

I backup over USB3 to a LaCie Rugged 1TB.
And network over Samba to a Synology 3TB drive.
Both are traditional spinning disks, not SSD.

OK, I know it is silly, but nice call on Time Machine backing up to the Tardis.

Hahaha! Thanks. It seemed perfect many years ago and I haven’t grown bored of it.

In other news, I’m back to using standard Time Machine for NAS backups (no ConnectMeNow or TimeMachineEditor) so I do think whatever the “Looking for backup disk” issue was it has been resolved by a recent macOS update. Which with modern Apple is surprising!

I have had a few clients who experience disconnects or not-found issues with their Time Machine backup drives. Usually just re-pointing TM to the device corrects things. Worst case you do the full, manual “undo/re-do”: toggle TM off, unmount the drive, restart the Mac, re-mount the drive, re-assign drive to TM and toggle TM back on.

Excessive, but it usually clears things, at least for a while.

Super worst case is a new drive, of course.

When this was an issue that dance gets boring fast and takes the automatic out of automatic backups!

I know this article is a year old, but it is very relevant to me right now. My AirPort Extreme 802.11ac (which hosts the TM backups for my household on a 6TB external drive) has gone unreliable, and since my “just in case of emergency” 2014 Mac mini is not only obsolete but is also flakey, I picked up a refurbished 2018 Mac mini to replace both devices (for a little over $400, which, given the dual-purpose of this replacement, addresses the cost-effectiveness issue that Ivan cited).

But I am running into a problem: After carefully following Apple’s simple directions for configuring the mini as a TM destination https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202784, I find that it does not accept the access credentials for any of the user accounts that work perfectly when logging into the mini directly.

In other words, when I manually mount the external (TM destination) drive from the Finder (after putting in login credentials), it mounts correctly. But when the same credentials are used within System Settings / General / Time Machine, they are rejected.

If anyone has any idea what I am doing wrong here, I would be most grateful.

carefully following Apple’s simple directions for configuring the mini as a TM destination https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202784, I find that it does not accept the access credentials for any of the user accounts that work perfectly when logging into the mini directly.

One of the reasons I eliminated TM over the network…with 2 different destination machines selected for alternating laptop backups…they random and inextricably fail despite all userids, numbers, shares, permissions, and passwords being the same…then the one that broke fixes itself with no action on my part and the other fails a few days later. Add in the .dmg instead of folders and I gave up. Set up rotating CCC clones which are finder readable…they mostly worked when I mounted the destination once, set up the job, and told the job to mount and I mount the destinations as needed. Still intermittent failures but fewer. Per either me thinking about it or maybe advice from Bombich…shifted the destination to the Remote Macintosh option with Safety Net enabled…and it just works.

Thank you for your perspective Neil. I also have CCC backups, but there are good reasons to have TM as well – not the least of which is ease of “turning back the clock” to recover an older copy of a file.

I just successfully did a Recovery using a Time Machine backup for an Intel iMac running Mojave. Also managed to migrate settings and data from a Macbook/Mojave to a Macbook Air M2/Ventura using another TM backup. In my book Time Machine is indispensable. My experiences are described here:

BTW - I also do CCC backups every few months.

The news of the Time Capsule’s demise may be somewhat premature. Mine’s (2TB) been in continuous use since I bought it when it first came out. It backs up 2 Macs. It was never 100% reliable, but the few times we’ve needed it, it was useful (not for mail - at least, not easily). Over the years I’ve occasionally had to repair it, erase it, remove and then reinstate it and such, but it still works as well as ever. I’m a belt-and-suspenders guy, so I also have a Time Machine on a fast external SSD over Lightning, which also contains a bootable clone, which I plug in every night; very fast. I also decided that I don’t need hourly backups, once a day (= night) is enough.

I’m aware that Time Capsules sometime die, and maybe I’ve been lucky, but before I’d quit on them I’d try to do whatever I could to keep them alive; it sometimes works. If not, then, of course, these other replacements need to come into play.

You could try mounting the Mini when you boot up the iMac (?) - add it to Account Login items. This might help Time Machine find the Mini with the backup files.

I have been remiss in following up with this thread. @mpainesyd, you are on the right track. To get the process started, I had to manually mount the share via SMB, and then got Time Machine going, After successfully inheriting the previous TM backup, it was no longer necessary to have the remote drive mounted in the Finder. The new/old (refurbished) Mac mini is working like a champ. That step (manually mounting the volume) is something I think Apple should include in their instructions.

There is one rub, however: The Mac mini itself cannot back up to that attached drive, Any attempt to use it comes with a warning that it will wipe out the contents of the drive (thereby killing the ability to use it as a remote TM backup for the other computers). I think the solution will be to create a new APFS volume on the external drive, and designate that as the TM backup for the Mac mini. That will be my experiment for later this week.

Thanks to all for the suggestions, and I promise to provide a more timely update with the results of this new experiment.

@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.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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

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.

I have TimeMachine on a Ubiquity NAS and it seems to be working fine for two machines.

I’ve got 2 Sequoia Macs doing TM network backups to an Intel Mini with an OWC “toaster” holding 2 cheap internal drives. I rotate them for redundancy. Also do an offsite backup. Network TM works fine, although the restore browser is get-a-cuppa-coffee-while-it-loads slow. About once a week I get a “couldn’t back up” alert. I ignore that, and within a few hours I notice that it’s backing up again.

A few times (yearly-ish) I’ve had to un-configure the shared backup folder and re-log in from the client Macs.

I’ve never seen a Mac Mini (back to PowerPC) that required a dongle to run headless, but maybe some models do. If running headless, there’s a fdesetup command you can use to reboot a FileVault-enabled Mac. [ed: insert link

That reminds me, International Verify Your Backups Day is next month!

I went back and read this entire thread. I have never used Time Machine but have always been interested in a network backup until I look at the cost.

I am reevaluating my backup flow. I use Chronosync and have been very happy with it.

I have a 2T USB drive that I move from machine to machine to back up user data. (MyPassport)

I also have two older 4T drives (MyBook) that I was backing up entire machines on (one was a backup of the backup). They are both pretty full now, I think I got them in 2016. They also have copies of other backup drives I had over the years from the beginning of time (thankfully those are way smaller)

I have a separate Lightroom drive (4T) and have bought an identical drive to back that up on (plus I’ve copied them to one of the older 4Ts as another backup). In the meantime my LR library went corrupt so that’s on my list.

Oh and I also have one of toaster docks (recommended from here a few years ago). I just have two drives for it and one is a bootable backup for the laptop. They are small though and boy have they gone up in price!

I am thinking of getting a newer drive and putting the MyBooks in storage. But I struggle with the thought of a larger drive that could go bad and cause me to lose everything.

I believe CS will backup over the network but I haven’t tried it yet. If it works I may hang a drive or two off the 2014 Mini.

So if I have a question, this would be it. What kind of drive sizes do you use if you’re not using a RAID type of system?

And considering I now have multiple technologies, is there anything I need to watch out for? 2015 MBPr on Sierra, 2011 iMac on Sierra, M4 Mini on Sequoia. The 2T MyPassport that I’ve had for a few years works fine on the Mini.

I’ve started buying 6TB (3.5”) drives, although I’m still getting along fine with mostly 4TB, backing up a 2TB work Mac and a 512MB home mac. I assume that any one drive may fail at any time, so rotation of multiple drives is important. Plus, it is preferable to run a second, completely separate other backup system. If your toaster has two slots, you can have two drives set to back up to and they’ll just alternate.

My backup host Mac has always been older than the client Macs. Sierra is a lot older than anything I have involving backup, so YMMV.

There are better backup experts around here than me, though!

You are right that it is not strictly required, but using a headless dongle can make an enormous difference in performance and available display resolutions. At US $5-15 per dongle, it’s 100% worthwhile, especially for older, slower machines.