My Time Capsule Drive Has Died. What Should I Do Now?

[james bow]

Hello, folks! Long time lurker, first time poster...

So, I have an older generation Apple Time Capsule (I think the one before they went tall and thin), and while it continues to access the Internet just fine and provides good WiFi, the Time Capsule drive no longer works. I'd like to hear some advice about what I should do now?

- Should I purchase the most recent generation Time Capsule, even though Apple appears to be getting out of the business?
- Should I get a different router, and plug an external hard drive into it?
- Should I just leave the Time Capsule alone and shut down my Time Machine, seeing as I already have iCloud to synchronize my files, and iDrive to do an online back-up. Maybe, if I'm feeling paranoid, I can plug in an external hard drive and use that as my new Time Machine?

Thank you for your time and attention. I look forward to your replies.

All the best,
James Bow (http://bowjamesbow.ca/blog.shtml)

 

[chscag]

Personally, I would purchase a good quality external hard drive and use it to make Time Machine backups. It appears that you have an additional safety net with off site back ups. You might also want to start making clone backups using something such as Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper. The latest version of CCC (5.0.3) works with both HFS+ and APFS.

As for replacing the TC with a router, that's up to you. I would not purchase another TC or Apple router since Apple has announced they're getting out of the TC and router business.

 

[ZapNZs]

You could replace the HDD in the Time Capsule if this is just a drive failure.

 

[convergent]

Apple has gotten out of the router business, so I would look for a better long term solution. I moved away from Airport and Time Capsule and went to a mesh network and use a NAS and external hard drives. If you have a simple environment, then just use an external drive directly on your machine for Time Machine, and then get a router that meets your need. Or you could keep using the Time Capsule for router until it no longer works.

 

[james bow]

Thanks for the responses, everybody. As it turns out, I've taken your advice and bought an external drive to attach to the Time Capsule and am using the Time Capsule as a router until it too dies. Then I'll look for a new non-Apple router.

 

[macjunk(ie)]

You can also buy a Synology or an equivalent NAS. These things are time machine compatible and you can configure them to have RAID level redundancy. Absolutely worth it in my opinion. I use a ASUS 3200 router to which my Synology 216J is connected. The 216J has two 4TB hard drives configured as a redundancy pair. Out of the 4TB, I have allocated 2TB to time machine backups and the rest is for media/photos/etc