Apple is burying the Time Capsule, but how to replace it?

Apple’s Time Capsule was always a strange item in the company’s hardware lineup. Coming out in 2008, after the introduction of the sleeker version of the AirPort Extreme Base Station, the Time Capsule combined Wi-Fi gateway features with internal hard drive storage that Time Machine could access using the Time Capsule as network-attached storage (NAS).

Time Capsule was discontinued in 2018, and Apple will drop support for it with the release of macOS 27 this fall. Apple’s announcement has prompted many people—including Six Colors subscriber Mattias—to replace a long-used (but long-in-the-tooth) backup solution:

My mom still uses my old AirPort Time Capsule as a Time Machine backup. Since it won’t be supported any longer, what’s the best replacement?

Matthias wondered about a simple Network Attached Storage (NAS) device as a replacement, but notes, “I never had to touch the Time Capsule. Don’t think it’d be the same with a full NAS.”

It’s a problem. Many people have continued to rely on a Time Capsule for simplicity’s sake. Plug it in, configure, and (one hopes) forget about it until you need to retrieve a file or restore a volume. While hard disk drives don’t last forever, they keep ticking away for years and years before—often suddenly—giving up the ghost.1

At some point, all Time Capsule owners will need to face the problem, even if they’re not planning to update to macOS 27 El Cerrito (or whatever it’s called). So let’s think about a solution.

Why the Time Capsule fit the time

Time Capsule tried to solve some interrelated problems: while you can use Time Machine to back up to a different Mac on your network, that required you to have a Mac you can leave on all night, or at the very least one you didn’t want taxed by performing network backups while you were working away on it.

Time Capsule was a hard drive and base station squooshed together without user-serviceable parts. (Photo by Andrew Davison)

Time Capsule was always on, could be located anywhere you could plug it in, handled connections over Wi-Fi and Ethernet, and allegedly just worked. As any of us who owned one recalls, it often didn’t just work. Backups would fail, requiring erasure of the entire internal drive with no option to recover older backups.2 There was no Disk First Aid for Time Capsule.

This became extra galling as the models advanced to 2 TB and 3 TB capacities in their final versions. While you could add an external drive, that seemed to defeat the point of a standalone unit, particularly when you remember the port was USB 2.0 or 480 Mbps, far below internal hard drive rates.3

Nonetheless, we didn’t have better options when the Time Capsule came out, and for years afterwards. Internet-hosted backups are a good supplement, but I don’t think there’s a drop-in replacement that boasts the same ease, even if reliability were not an issue.

Replace the Time Capsule

What can you do today to replace a Time Capsule and provide the functionality it offered? You have effectively three choices:

Add a drive (or drives) to a desktop Mac.

Install a NAS that supports the features required for Time Machine.

Use a third-party tool that is tweakier than Time Machine, but may fit the bill better.

Time Machine’s key attributes are that you can set it and forget it, that it prunes older backups over time without intervention, and that it’s integrated into macOS for easy (by some definitions) retrievals of older versions of files and deleted files.4

I have a desktop Mac, and use cloning software to make a nightly duplicate of my startup volume and Backblaze for Internet-based encrypted backups. Most of my documents are on Dropbox or iCloud Drive, so I felt I had sufficient redundancy. I balked at using Time Machine, as it was so fiddly and unreliable for a long time, requiring erasing external drives or poking at low-level settings.

The other issue was how inefficiently Time Machine interacted with hard drives. During active backups, whatever CPU management Apple said was in place, my computer would be affected, and I’d also have to hear the whirs and whines of active drives.

At some point (I’d say about four or five years ago), Time Machine improved in quality, and solid-state drives started to drop in price for compact 1 TB USB 3.x models, which could connect at 5 to 10 Gbps; later 2 TB SSDs dropped in price enough to fit my budget, too. I’m embarrassed to show a photo, but here are three of the five SSDs connected to my Mac: four are 2 TB, and one is a dual 4 TB RAID 0 configuration that gives me an 8 TB volume.5 Two others are plugged in elsewhere!

Affordable 2 TB SSDs enabled me to have reliable, fast Time Machine backups and not waste time on HDD failures.

Using an SSD plugged directly into a Mac could be a solution. Even if you don’t have a desktop Mac, plugging in an SSD on a regular basis when you’re using the laptop on a desk or other location is feasible, too: Time Machine automatically picks up when an associated volume is mounted.

The improvement I saw in Time Machine and the switch to SSDs made it feasible for a desktop Mac to serve as the networked destination for four family laptops, including mine. So I didn’t go down the NAS path. There are inexpensive NAS options that can be remotely administered, if you’re helping a relative or need remote access, and support the protocols needed for Time Machine. Synology has a tech-support note on using Time Machine with its devices. And I recommend looking at Tailscale for ensuring you can always tunnel in; the company also has NAS support. (See my long background look at Tailscale at TidBITS, and a specific usage case here at Six Colors.)

You might also look into third-party tools that perform various kinds of cloning and archiving operations, though you need an external drive, a networked Mac with an accessible drive, or a NAS to make use of them:

Carbon Copy Cloner remains the best option for cloning, with some archiving options. (SuperDuper is a long-time favorite, but its Tahoe support remains in beta, according to its Website.)

Arq and ChronoSync each provide exhaustive options for scheduled cloning and archiving, but have a learning curve that can be steep depending on your precise backup goal. They’re not drop-in Time Machine replacements, but can be configured to an approximation.

All of those apps offer flexibility in backup destinations. I’ve used ChronoSync to archive files on one of my virtual Linux servers over SFTP to my Mac, for instance. And you could archive critical files with encryption on cloud-storage systems, too.

I do wish someone would release a Time Capsule successor that was nearly single-purpose and had two or four slots for NVMe M.2 format SSDs. Rather than a highly configurable NAS, just give us something that plugs and goes—and can be upgraded and repaired!

For further reading

Take Control publisher Joe Kissell offers a deep dive into Mac backups that can help you find and execute the right strategy in Take Control of Backing Up Your Mac. It was updated in December for Tahoe, as well as the latest changes in the hardware and software he covers.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

The Time Capsule was also notorious for its power supply failing. So even if the drive keeps working, the power might not. In which case, you have to disassemble the unit to remove the drive if you need to recover the files on it, then mount it via an adapter or external case. ↩

After I complained about the inability to back up the backup on a Time Capsule, the AirPort product team added an Archive button, which was allegedly called the “Glenn button” internally. Thus was once the power of tech journalists. ↩

The AirPort Extreme could also support external Time Machine volumes over USB 2.0, although Apple initially didn’t support this officially. ↩

Deleted files aren’t retained indefinitely. ↩

I have had multiple high-capacity drive failures, including what I thought was a failsafe: two RAID 1 (mirrored) 12 TB hard drives, each of high quality. But when one failed, it apparently brought the other down with it, and neither was recoverable. What was the point? Given the amount of time and money I’d invested previously to keep things running that failed, I spent a small wad to get two 4 TB high-speed SSD cards and a compact dual-card enclosure. ↩