Build Your Own Time Capsule Work-Alike For $200

An anonymous reader writes "If you're a Windows or Linux user, or simply an Apple user that can't justify the $500 price tag on those beautiful 3TB Time Capsules, why not build your own? With a wireless router, an external USB hard drive, and a little bit of setting up, you can make your own wireless, network-attached backup device for around $200."

Comments

Foolproof my arse!

[Chas]

Sorry, but I always laugh when people describe anything as "foolproof". (In this case the meshing of Time Machine and the Time Capsule.

All it does is show a PROFOUND underestimation of the creativity and destructive potential of fools.

Re:Foolproof my arse!

[Relayman]

Actually, I had to start over because I'm used to the wireless network having its own address pool. With Time Capsule, the wireless network uses the same address pool as the wired network (by passing wireless DHCP requests through to my SonicWALL firewall where the DHCP server is located). Too cool!

Re:Foolproof my arse!

[geekmux]

Sorry, but I always laugh when people describe anything as "foolproof". (In this case the meshing of Time Machine and the Time Capsule.

All it does is show a PROFOUND underestimation of the creativity and destructive potential of fools.

You make a sound point here, but in the relative scheme of things, Apples solutions are rather foolproof and extremely intuitive by comparison. And I'm not trying to be some fanboy either, just stating what I've seen owning and working in multi-vendor/OS environments.

Re:Foolproof my arse!

[jedidiah]

Are you kidding?

Have you ever actually used any of this crap?

Time Machine can't even reliably stay connected to a directly attached device. I shudder to think what adding a network to the mix or heavy forbid a WIRELESS network into the mix would do.

Apple is highly overrated. Driven by general ignorance and mindless fanboys.

That said, you can BUY ready made solutions for the PC. You don't have to build your own solution. Plus, if you do build your own then the possibilities are endless and you can end up with something that's even better than Time Machine in some ways.

Re:Foolproof my arse!

[UnknowingFool]

A Time Capsule is a wireless router and a NAS in one unit. They exist separately; however, I could not find a competing current product that is both. I did find some discontinuedodels that were in the 250MB range.

Re:Foolproof my arse!

[randomaxe]

It's funny you should say that. I bought a Mac Mini just to test the OS X waters about three or four years ago, and found myself switching entirely to Mac within just a few months. I now have a Mac Mini in my office and a Mac Mini as part of my home theater system, each directly hooked to an external Time Machine drive, and my wife and I have MacBooks that use a DroboFS for wireless backups, approximating the experience of using a Time Capsule. Every one of these machines has performed Time Machine backups hourly for the entire duration that they have been powered up, and I have yet to have a single issue backing up or retrieving data from a backup.

I am not an Apple fanboy, but I am a "things that work exactly like they're supposed to" fanboy. YMMV of course, but in my experience, Time Machine has been nothing short of stellar.

That said, and back to the topic at hand, a DroboFS on your network makes a fantastic Time-Capsule-alike, especially since you can expand the capacity as needed.

Re:Foolproof my arse!

[Cinder6]

Probably not worth replying, but oh well, here goes.

I just bit the bullet and got a 2TB Time Capsule. The first thing that struck me was that it came with no install CDs, unlike all the other prebuilt NAS solutions I've used in the past. I opened up Airport Utility (comes on OS X, download for Windows) and it saw my new Capsule right away over wireless. It asked for a password. It then asked how I wanted it to connect to the network--was it going to be a router or a bridge or just a NAS device? I told it to be a wireless bridge, and it asked me if I was replacing any hardware. I said yes, and it asked me which SSID. After I told it, it told me to disconnect the old wireless bridge I had, and then copied all of the old wifi settings from what was saved on my computer.

It auto-configured the wireless settings. My other devices didn't even notice a difference--they kept acting like it was the same exact network, no password re-entry required.

So, yes, I would have to say that this was, by far, the easiest time I have ever had adding something to my network. It's not a huge deal, because it's the type of thing you set once and never touch again, but it's easy enough that my parents could get one and install it themselves and have a working automatic backup solution. And yes, Time Machine works wonderfully, both over wifi and wired.

Not trying to be an Apple shill, there are many things they do that I'm not particularly fond of, but Time Capsule is one thing they got right.

Re:Foolproof my arse!

[jimicus]

Are you kidding?

Have you ever actually used any of this crap?

Time Machine can't even reliably stay connected to a directly attached device. I shudder to think what adding a network to the mix or heavy forbid a WIRELESS network into the mix would do.

That's funny, I successfully restored this very laptop from a Time Machine backup over a network (not even from a Time Capsule - from a Synology Diskstation as it happens) only last night.

I could have sworn it went absolutely perfectly.

Re:Foolproof my arse!

[Seq]

My wife's mac has used time machine since it came out. I actually bought an airport extreme w/ time capsule support (which sucks -- there is no web ui, so I had to borrow her mac to configure it). Every six months or so time capsule would stop working for some reason. Only solution I could find was to turn it off, blow away all backups on the airport extreme's attached disk, and reconnect.

I got fed up with the airport one day and installed netatalk on my server home. It's been working for well over a year now with no problems. So obviously since my experience is directly applicable to everybody, we can infer that this generic router plus external USB disk will actually be more reliable than apple's solution.

Re:Foolproof my arse!

[hondo77]

Are you kidding?

Have you ever actually used any of this crap?

Time Machine can't even reliably stay connected to a directly attached device. I shudder to think what adding a network to the mix or heavy forbid a WIRELESS network into the mix would do.

Have you? I have three iMacs running Time Machine, all directly connected to the disk (one a Time Capsule), and have never seen the behavior you describe.

Re:Foolproof my arse!

[dslbrian]

Not trying to be an Apple shill, there are many things they do that I'm not particularly fond of, but Time Capsule is one thing they got right.

Ah, well get back to us in 18 months.

Re:Foolproof my arse!

[Cinder6]

Hopefully that won't happen :) We've gone through a couple hardware revisions since that article was written.

Re:Foolproof my arse!

[jc42]

"Time Machine can't even reliably stay connected to a directly attached device. I shudder to think what adding a network to the mix or heavy forbid a WIRELESS network into the mix would do." Tons of people have never had a single problem as you describe. You're probably dicking around with stuff you sholdn't be which is screwing it up. Attempting to prove you "hacker" manhood no doubt.

Well, how it worked in our house might be illustrative. My wife got a Time Machine for her new iMac, and let it run for a few months, until its disk drive turned flakey. She took it back to the Apple store, where they decreed the disk hopeless, and gave her a new one. It had the OS stuff, but not her files, of course, so she plugged in the Time Machine and tried to restore her files. Total failure. After a day or so of getting progressively more frustrated, she took the iMac and the Time Machine back to the store, where it disappeared into their back room for half an hour or so. Then they returned it, saying that it was all loaded. So she took it home, and found that, while her files were loaded, they weren't in the same directory as before, so all sorts of things could find the files.

I poked around a bit, using a few Terminal windows, and eventually used tar (;-) to restore her files to the original pathnames, after which nearly everything worked right.

Now, I can hear you saying she was "dicking around with stuff she shouldn't be which screwed it up". Yeah, she was; but she called it "trying to follow the directions for restoring her files". Apparently the Time Machine wasn't designed for a user who didn't understand how it works, and she shouldn't have been trying to actually use it as advertised, because that would screw it up.

Actually, I don't think the TM was screwed up. The nice folks at the Apple Store didn't seem to think so, and they did do a restore (to the wrong pathnames ;-). And I managed to undo that damage fairly quickly.

I think the problem was that it wasn't documented in a way that she could understand and operate properly.

Anyway, I have a Macbook Pro and a couple of linux boxes (that are my "real" internet-facing machines ;-). I back all of them up using rsync to an external disk. This works fine for me. I can (and do) restore any files on it to any of the machines, to the directories where I want them restored (which is sometimes the original directory). But I don't do it with any vendor's proprietary software, I use rsync. Or sometimes tar or cpio. Or "cp -r", though that does break hard links, which I tend to use a lot. They have documentation that I can understand, and it easy to verify that the results are usable.

In any case, it might feel good to express contempt for "lusers" who can't get backup software to work right. But this doesn't help those users when they need it. There's a widespread estimate that around half the time, backups turn out to be useless, because when you need to use them on the new hardware, they fail. This was our experience with Apple's vaunted Time Machine. Being told we shouldn't be dicking around with it because we'll screw things up doesn't help; it just persuades me that we made a mistake buying the "user friendly" backup system in the first place.

YMMV, of course.

(And she still likes her iMac. She's just less impressed with Apples so-called quality than she once was. She still runs the TM, but we're not confident that it'll work the next time we need it. This is in part because I don't know how to test it. ;-)

Re:Foolproof my arse!

[jc42]

I have three iMacs running Time Machine, all directly connected to the disk (one a Time Capsule), and have never seen the behavior you describe.

This reminds me of the old joke: A colleague asks a judge how his latest case is going, and the judge says "We had to let the defendent go." "Huh? I thought the prosecution had three witnesses who could testify that they'd seen him do it." "Yeah, but the defense had twenty witnesses who testified that they hadn't seen him do it."

(You do run across this sort of logic rather often hereabouts. ;-)

Re:Foolproof my arse!

[dgatwood]

Then they returned it, saying that it was all loaded. So she took it home, and found that, while her files were loaded, they weren't in the same directory as before, so all sorts of things could[n't] find the files.

Let me guess. They restored the backup, but didn't do the next step, which is (after setting up the machine) to create a second user with the same username as the original user. Sloppy tech work.

As for your failed restore, I'm curious what error you got when you tried to restore it with the normal restore process. And please tell me you filed a bug at bugreport.apple.com. :-)

Re:Foolproof my arse!

[dgatwood]

I got fed up with the airport one day and installed netatalk on my server home. It's been working for well over a year now with no problems.

Make absolutely certain that you are using the 2.2 beta versions of Netatalk and not the 2.1 stable versions. Only the 2.2 series implements the AFP replay cache and lock stealing so that you won't get data corruption when you put your machine to sleep in the middle of a backup. It's rather dangerous to use Netatalk 2.1 or earlier for backups. You might get lucky, but....

Re:Foolproof my arse!

[teh kurisu]

When you say "can't even reliably stay connected to a directly attached device", are you talking about a hard drive connected using USB (or FireWire)? Staying connected to the drive should be the job of the OS and shouldn't be an issue with Time Machine itself. Or is the problem due to the fact that Time Machine doesn't recognise the contents of the drive as a valid Time Machine backup?

From your description, I'm inclined to say that it was just a faulty hard drive, rather than having anything to do with Time Machine.

I've had problems with Time Machine before, where it would fill up the drive and then refuse to automatically remove older backups to make way for newer ones. I haven't had that problem recently, though, so I assumed that it had been fixed in a software update.

Re:Foolproof my arse!

[jdray]

My first time machine failed almost 18 months to the day after I bought it. I took it to the Apple store, and they replaced it for me, no hassle. I took the new one home, plugged it in, and used it for sixteen months before it crapped out again, stone cold dead. This was two weeks ago. My MacBook Pro is in dire need of replacement, and I don't want to do that before I have a reliable backup of the system I have. I'm starting to think that Apple sacrificed quality in favor of ease of use and (relatively) low price. The triangle is classic, but I'm somewhat surprised that Apple, historically leaning toward quality and ease of use, damn the price, went this way.

Re:Foolproof my arse!

[Cinder6]

That is somewhat surprising. When they replaced it, did you get a brand-new model, or a refurbished one?

Re:Foolproof my arse!

[jdray]

Hard to say. The Apple Store guy only had one in stock, and I took it. It was a bit frustrating at the time, but the quality of service I received at the store really mitigated my ire. But twice in as many years is too much. We're an all-Apple household and have been for years, but this sort of thing makes me wonder about the viability of their infrastructure components.

Lack of polish

[spire3661]

Sure any geek can setup a versioning backup system. Time Capsule is elegant as hell and really easy to use, even for a lay person. The way its visualized is pretty much the only way a GUI for this type of functionality (targeted at lay folk) should work.

Re:Lack of polish

[admiralranga]

This. Its why time capsule holds so much appeal, its the very user friend gui. Sure i and probably a decent proportion could put together something that does the same function as a time capsule for the bits in our parts box's, couple hundred meg of dled software and the price of the hdd's. But it sure as hell wouldn't be any where close to as user friendly as a time capsule.

Re:Lack of polish

[jo_ham]

This is exactly the comment that should be modded up.

Yes, geeks have been doing versioning backup systems for ages, and what Apple does is not new by any stretch of the imagination. What they have done with Time Machine is make it easy enough for anyone to use to expand the number of people who use backups now that we are all using our computers more and more.

And yes, the Time Capsule is expensive, but you can use Time Machine on any network share (there's a setting you can flip using the command line) and with very little messing with third party products (several SAN boxes support it out of the box).

It's still a little too basic in some areas for more technical users - I'd like to be able to query at a glance what files were backed up, for example (the lack of logging and stats is quite a glaring omission - sure it *says* it's backing up your home folder, but is it really? Confirmation is king for backups!). I'd also like to be able to specify external disks to *include*, not just exclude, so it would back up my USB stick whenever I mounted it, for example (since not all files and important data that end up on it originate on my home machine and it's easy to lose or damage it).

As a simple to use, elegant backup system it is really very good, and you really don't have to shell out $500 to Apple to use it effectively.

Re:Lack of polish

[TheRaven64]

Yes, geeks have been doing versioning backup systems for ages, and what Apple does is not new by any stretch of the imagination

Actually, it's pretty novel. No other *NIX systems that I'm aware of permitted hard linking directories. Doing this with Time Machine was a pretty neat trick. Any directories that haven't been modified are just hard links to the previous version. Directories that have been modified contain hard links to files in the previous version. The copy-on-write support in ZFS is a more elegant way of doing this (just clone the backup volume and apply changes), but Apple managed it without needing to modify anything other than the VFS layer.

The thing that Time Capsule adds is basically the ability for a remote device to issue an fsync command. When Time Machine finishes running, it knows that the data is safe on the Time Capsule's disk, not in some cache somewhere. Again, not a massive improvement, but an attention to detail that's important if you care about your data.

It's still a little too basic in some areas for more technical users - I'd like to be able to query at a glance what files were backed up,

This is trivial to do. Just look at the time machine snapshot. ls -R will give you all of the information that you want.

Re:Lack of polish

[h4rr4r]

How is that any different than rsync?
I think you are giving apple too much credit.

Re:Lack of polish

[geekoid]

Don't all POSIX compliant OS support hard linking?

Re:Lack of polish

[j-beda]

Don't all POSIX compliant OS support hard linking?

I don't think you can regularly hard link directories. See this for example: http://linuxgazette.net/93/tag/2.html

Re:Lack of polish

[arth1]

Actually, it's pretty novel. No other *NIX systems that I'm aware of permitted hard linking directories.

It's intentionally disabled in Linux, and there's a good reason for that.

mkdir foo
cd foo
ln -d ../foo .
ls -R

Re:Lack of polish

[Angostura]

There's a nice little free app called BackupLoupe that will let you examine what was backed up and when.

Re:Lack of polish

[chaim79]

Hard linking of files yes, but hard linking of directories no.

This is important for Time Machine space saving because instead a directory full of hard links to files it's one hard link to the directory. Each link takes a bit of space, dropping several thousand of them saves a lot of space on the backup drive without losing any information.

Re:Lack of polish

[gstoddart]

How is that any different than rsync?
I think you are giving apple too much credit.

I get the impression that the Time Capsule is actually keeping versions ... so every time you modify a file, you have the backup.

Rsync is basically just doing a copy.

I'm not 100% sure, but I get the impression that the actual Apple product is doing something more complicated than a simple rsync.

Re:Lack of polish

[kbolino]

Because cycle detection is such a difficult algorithm.

Re:Lack of polish

[TheRaven64]

Not for directories. In fact, POSIX requires that the destination passed to the link() system call not be a directory. Most UNIX systems permit hard linking of files, but not directories. There is a good reason for this: if you can hard link directories then you can make cycles in a directory 'tree'. Symbolic links are easily identifiable, so you can simply not follow them if they point up to a higher point in the hierarchy (or at all), but hard links are indistinguishable from normal files: they are just normal files.

On OS X, Time Machine is permitted to do this, and is responsible for ensuring that the directory hierarchy that it creates is acyclic. It can guarantee this because it is just mirroring an existing hierarchy, and using hard links to save space. Each time Time Machine runs, it creates a new directory structure that looks exactly like the structure that it is snapshotting. If nothing has changed since the last snapshot, then this is just a hard link to the last snapshot, so it just takes one inode. Doing this with a system that only allows hard links to files would require one new inode per directory in the snapshot.

As I said, it's basically a poor-man's version of ZFS O(1) snapshots, it's just neat that they implemented it in a non-invasive fashion.

Re:Lack of polish

[rthille]

Not of directories. The trouble with hard-linking of directories is you can have filesystem loops that are more difficult to detect than with symlinks.

Re:Lack of polish

[lucian1900]

The GUI is precisely what I intensely hate about it! It's silly, useless, breaks TotalFinder, makes my laptop overhead an makes partial restores extremely difficult.

The actual backup functionality is good, though.

Re:Lack of polish

[cayenne8]

How is that any different than rsync?

I've just bought a RAID 5 bay box from Sans Digital. I'm about to load it up with drives....and try to set it up as a NAS for my computers to use.

Do you know of any links of good primers for:

1. rsync?

2. backup strategies in general?

And for that matter...I hear a lot of people on here say that backing up to disks or sets of disks isn't really backup...do people only consider tape to be a viable backup? Where does one get a reasonable tape backup for home or small office?

Thanks in advance!!

Re:Lack of polish

[shutdown -p now]

No other *NIX systems that I'm aware of permitted hard linking directories.

That's surprising and very interesting. I must admit I have always thought that it should "just work" in any Unix. They certainly do in Windows (since Vista, anyway). Is there any technical reason for why this is so, or is it an arbitrary limitation?

At the same time, in Windows, you actually have to tell mklink whether you're creating a link to a file or to a directory when creating a symbolic link, which seems strange to me (why can't it determine the correct course of action while resolving the link?). For hard links, though, it doesn't need to be told the difference. Weird.

Re:Lack of polish

[shutdown -p now]

... correcting my previous post. Okay, so I've actually tried, and you can't create hard links for directories in Windows, either (as a side note, the error message you get from mklink if you try is truly a pinnacle of user-friendly UI: it says "access denied"). You can create junctions, but that is not the same thing.

Now I'm really curious as to why. When two completely different OS families share the same limitation, surely there must be some good reason?

Re:Lack of polish

[nschubach]

That was my impression as well. I thought the whole idea of a time capsule was being able to go back a week in the file's life if you needed. The solution in the article does not do that.

Re:Lack of polish

[amliebsch]

RAID is definitely not a backup. For one thing, it (by itself) doesn't keep multiple versions of your files.

However, backing up to external hard drives IS a backup. To be a GOOD backup, you should back up to multiple hard drives. It might be improbable to have two drives fail one right after another, but it's not impossible (especially if there are environmental factors.) The more drives you back up to, the less chance that a multiple failure will hurt you. Ideally, you should always have at least one of the backup drives offsite as well.

Backing up TO a fault-tolerant RAID is a decent idea, but again you ideally want off-site replication in that case.

Re:Lack of polish

[TheRaven64]

Yup - because it's an insanely dangerous thing to allow. A lot of software assumes that the directory tree is... a tree. Hard links are not really links. A directory is just a map from names to files. A hard link creates another map entry. Both are equally authoritative. This means that you can do things like make a directory that contains its parent directory if you allow hard linking of directories. Now, you have a cycle and any application that tries to recursively visit the directory tree will never terminate. Worse, lots of tools do depth-first searches of the tree, so they won't even see all of the real directories. Visiting an arbitrary graph requires you to mark every node, requiring a minimum of one bit per directory on the disk, which can be a lot. Time Machine guarantees that it will not create cycles, so the OS gives it a special privilege.

Symbolic links are much safer. They can be trivially distinguished from normal files, so they can point to directories.

Re:Lack of polish

[Medievalist]

Actually, it's pretty novel. No other *NIX systems that I'm aware of permitted hard linking directories. Doing this with Time Machine was a pretty neat trick. Any directories that haven't been modified are just hard links to the previous version. Directories that have been modified contain hard links to files in the previous version.

Naw, I disagree. We've been doing all that at work since late 2005. I keep planning to set up a WRT54G implementation with a big USB disk at home, but somehow I never get around to it... the beer won't drink itself, you know!

Time machine is a trivial elaboration on Rubel & Schulz, and nothing special to linux geeks, although it is obviously da bomb for mac users who haven't yet transcended "point and grunt".

My own implementation requires adding a line to a flat ascii config file in order to add a new host, so GUI users are unlikely to find it attractive.

Re:Lack of polish

[mlts]

It uses hard linking as the secret sauce. Backups with one file that stays static just drop a link. If the file is changed, you will find the actual file in the directory.

All and all, a pretty clever system. Only downside is having to make sure you strip the Locked bit if you manually restore data.

I prefer having a dedicated backup server pull data from machines as opposed to having machines save to a NAS, just because if a box gets infected, it can easily scrozzle the NAS, while its damage to a backup server would be minimal.

Perhaps Symantec should have a NetBackup appliance for home users?

Re:Lack of polish

[shutdown -p now]

Symbolic links are much safer. They can be trivially distinguished from normal files, so they can point to directories.

I wish that was so. There is so much Windows software out there that is horribly broken by any circular symbolic link, since you still do need to check explicitly when you traverse, and, of course, symbolic links only got added in Vista (and even today many people aren't aware of them).

But I see the point now. I did consider that it was unsafe because of potential cycles, but then I thought that symlinks allow for them anyway - it didn't occur to me that symlinks are trivial to check for, whereas hardlink is indistinguishable from any other directory. Thanks for explaining this.

Re:Lack of polish

[TheRaven64]

Really? You had a version of Linux that permitted hard-linking directories in 2005? Shame you never sent your patches upstream. And a remote system that guaranteed files sent over the network were flushed to disk? Or, is it perhaps that you either didn't read my post or have no idea what you are talking about?

Re:Lack of polish

[Medievalist]

Did you read my link THAT FAST? You read way faster than me!

Yes, yes, no, yes, no, possibly.

Re:Lack of polish

[TheRaven64]

It's harder for Windows, because a lot of software was written before links were allowed. Although, actually, it was possible to create cycles like this even in DOS, with the combination of JOIN and SUBST. SUBST let you create a new 'drive' that was really a path in an existing disk. JOIN let you create a new path that was a drive. I managed to break Norton Change Directory with this - it tried to follow a recursive path and ran out of memory.

In UNIX-land, most system calls have a l- prefixed version, which allow for special handling of symbolic links. Code that traverses a file hierarchy usually uses ftw() or fts_*(), which handle this for you.

Re:Lack of polish

[h4rr4r]

Look into rsnapshot.

Discs can be a backup, if they are offsite and spend most of their time powered off. Anything that is online means one person can kill all your copies from one place.

Re:Lack of polish

[UnknowingFool]

If you have a Mac, it does as the article's solution is then just setting up a NAS. Time Machine on the Mac does not require Time Capsule as long as you've set up network drives correctly. Time Capsule allows the average consume the ability to bypass the step of setting up the drives. If you had Windows Backup and Restore lacks the ability to restore individual files without restoring the whole save point. At it did when I last used it.

Re:Lack of polish

[gstoddart]

If you had Windows Backup and Restore lacks the ability to restore individual files without restoring the whole save point. At it did when I last used it.

I'm getting close to ditching the Windows Backup and Restore because it's so damned limited.

My "Vista Home Ultimate" only allows me to have one backup scheduled ... I can't schedule one drive to back up to one place, and another to back up to another. It's got almost no granularity of anything, and generally seems like it was so crippled to give you something which was "almost adequate" as a backup solution. Because heaven forbid Microsoft give me something functional ... they want the extra money from the Vista Ultimate Super Duper Edition.

I didn't realize I couldn't restore individual files ... which I think pretty much makes the software useless to me. Time to look into an alternative I guess.

I've got truck loads of disk space, but I think now I need to find better software for this kind of thing.

Re:Lack of polish

[TheRaven64]

I've read it before. I clicked on it to see what it was, but then returned after that. Interestingly, if something's published in 2004, it's possible to have seen it before 2011.

Re:Lack of polish

[jimicus]

If you have a Mac, it does as the article's solution is then just setting up a NAS. Time Machine on the Mac does not require Time Capsule as long as you've set up network drives correctly. Time Capsule allows the average consume the ability to bypass the step of setting up the drives. If you had Windows Backup and Restore lacks the ability to restore individual files without restoring the whole save point. At it did when I last used it.

It does require a NAS that supports Time Machine - IIRC you can't just hook into any old Samba share. Most half-decent NAS units will; I don't know if this is true of routers with USB ports.

Re:Lack of polish

[cayenne8]

Backing up TO a fault-tolerant RAID is a decent idea, but again you ideally want off-site replication in that case.

Ok, thank you and the others for the clarification.

I'm just experimenting and wanting to learn how to do this...I'm wanting to figure a back up to a fault tolerant RAID (after I get this working, will figure how to set up an identical one offsite that mirrors this one) and have backups of all OSes I use (Linux, OSX and Windows).

I'm trying to find a good tutorial/primer on rsync. I learn MUCH faster and better with real examples rather than just the man page type things that are abstracted out.

Re:Lack of polish

[Sebastopol]

And not just lay folks. I work on PC & linux boxes all day, and when I get home, the LAST thing I want to ever do is fuck with a control panel or a setting or a BIOS or install software. Sure, 20 years ago I'd be all over this, but at some point, layperson or not, the effort required to make something work is time taken away from my spouse or kids or cats or non computer related hobbies.

just my $0.02 to all the people/kids who can't understand why someone would pay a premium for an apple product like this, and why good design and simplicity really does matter.

Re:Lack of polish

[h4rr4r]

rsnapshot does that, fire it off with fsniper if you need to it go into action everytime a file is touched. Would be better just using a COW filesystem though. This is not a problem that should be shoved into userspace.

Re:Lack of polish

[LDAPMAN]

They handle it by requiring a special permission to create hard links to directories. Time Machine has that permission, other processes do not.

Re:Lack of polish

[Rockoon]

It has nothing to do with how easy it is to detect the recursion. It has to do with the fact that POSIX compliant programs dont try to, nor need to, detect the recursion.

Thats the end of the debate.

Re:Lack of polish

[syousef]

Sounds a lot like robocopygui if you ask me, only much more expensive.

Re:Lack of polish

[WuphonsReach]

Rsync is basically just doing a copy.

And it's not hard to tell rsync to create a copy before it does the sync (Easy Automated Snapshot-Style Backups with Linux and Rsync).

Although personally, I prefer rdiff-backup.

Apples just takes the concept and takes a lot of the black magic out of the system, then puts a useable UI on it.

Re:Lack of polish

[jo_ham]

In the same way that Linux sounds like Windows ME, just much cheaper.

Re:Lack of polish

[jc42]

Actually, the original (Bell Labs) unix systems all implemented hard links for directories. Or, more accurately, they implemented hard links for any and all files. The kernel's link() routine restricted linked directories to the super-user. The reason was as others here have mentioned: Hard-linked directories may result in loops in the directory "tree", which produces infinite recursion for naive tree-walking code. Since there was no way to prevent programmers from writing tree-walking code that lacked the obvious loop check, they decided it would be safer to block hard-linking of directories. But, aside from this check, the kernel code was quite capable of hard-linking any file to a new name in any directory.

Apple's hard-linked Time Machine directories may be a case of the same thing. Since the directories are only created by the TM software itself, and the OSX file system doesn't permit hard-linked directories (for non-superusers?), there's no danger of loops appearing in the TM's directory tree. They may have just relaxed the restriction in this case, since the result will usually be a significant saving of disk space.

Re:Lack of polish

[j-beda]

I did not know that - thanks for the info.

Apple's hard-linked Time Machine directories may be a case of the same thing. Since the directories are only created by the TM software itself, and the OSX file system doesn't permit hard-linked directories (for non-superusers?), there's no danger of loops appearing in the TM's directory tree. They may have just relaxed the restriction in this case, since the result will usually be a significant saving of disk space.

Not only disk space savings, but also huge amounts of time savings - starting at the top of the structure, as soon as an unmodified directory is encountered, you make a hard link and move on. If little has changed, there is not much file reading or writing.

Re:Lack of polish

[arth1]

Actually, recursive directory loop detection is difficult. With hardlinks, you can't tell what any of the other links are, so it's only by actually traversing the directories that you can find out whether there is a problem. If you find a problem halfway through a recursive command, if you abort, you have a partially executed command, which you don't want.
Pre-recursing? That's worse - the branch structure can change while you traverse the tree, so you can't pre-scan unless you put a notify on every single directory you add to the scan. Never mind that pre-scanning adds substantial delays for any moderately complex directory structure.

You're not the first who fall into the trap of thinking this is easily solvable. Read up on NFS crossmounts and the various ingenious solutions that people have applied, and unix gurus have then ripped out because they caused harm.

You also run a real risk of each program doing this differently, with unpredictable behaviours as a result. Besides, as the other poster said, you don't need to implement such an algorithm because the standards say that you can assume that there isn't any loops within a single file system.

come on submitters!

[Thud457]

howzabout a direct link to the print version that's not arbitrarily hacked into chunks to inflate ad views?

Re:come on submitters!

[Relayman]

The editors should standardize this. The article on Stuxnet from Wired was correctly linked the other day.

Re:come on submitters!

[Fnord666]

The editors should standardize this. The article on Stuxnet from Wired was correctly linked the other day.

What? Outrageous! I demand that editor be fired immediately!

200 my foot!

[SethThresher]

Or, you can just bury all your media in an old shoebox in your backyard for free!

Re:200 my foot!

[geekoid]

are you kidding me? do you realize there support nightmare?

"I have a show box but nothing is happening"
"Do you have a spade 2.1?"
"umm.. sure..er no.. what do you mean?"
"a device doe digging a holes?"
"I have a shovel."
"Great, no simply dig a hole.."
"How"
"What was that?"
"how do I dig one of these so called holes?"
"Grip the shovel.."
"I can't do that"
"Why not?"
"I am holding the shoe box"

at which point we all realize that people are a product of design...by Infocom.

Re:200 my foot!

[UnknowingFool]

Not to mention every minute, Clippy pops up and says "I see you are digging a hole, would you like to do that in PowerPoint?"

Shortcut

[Azmodan]

If you don't wanna read TFA : Get a router with a usb port, add a usb hd. TADAM!

That's 5 minutes of my life I won't get back.

[jimicus]

I RTFA (I know, I know) and it amounts to:

1. Buy one of the many wireless routers coming onto the market that support plugging in a USB hard disk and sharing it over the network.
2. Buy a USB hard disk.
3. Format the USB hard disk and plug it into the router.
4. Profit!

Re:That's 5 minutes of my life I won't get back.

[uglyduckling]

In fact, you can buy an Airport Extreme base station, plug in any external USB drive, and use that as a Time Machine backup. It's not as pretty as a Time Capsule, but who cares when it's hidden under the desk? The advantage is that Airport Extremes have excellent wireless range, and can be used with the point-and-drool Airport configuration utility. And you get to feel good for giving even more money to Apple whilst sort-of screwing them by finding a cheaper option.

Re:That's 5 minutes of my life I won't get back.

[jojoba_oil]

And this is proof that it's not something a tech-savvy person is actually required for. Sure, twiddle a few settings in the router's GUI, but that's about as advanced as it gets...

Once again showing that Apple products typically cost 2.5 to 3 times more than non-Apple equivalents.

Re:That's 5 minutes of my life I won't get back.

[geekoid]

That argument is pretty much dead.

Price an Apple computer against a competitors eq. computer. They will be pretty close.

Re:That's 5 minutes of my life I won't get back.

[jojoba_oil]

That argument is pretty much dead.

Price an Apple computer against a competitors eq. computer. They will be pretty close.

Uh. Really? Howabout the MacBook Air? It's basically an Apple Netbook, but they won't call it that. There are plenty of sites explaining how to install MacOS onto price-cheaper Dell and getting basically the same thing. Just Google "Hackintosh Dell".

Base price of a MacBook Air: $1000

Price of a hackintosh-friendly Dell Mini 9: $400

Result: $1000 = $400 * 2.5

Site: http://gizmodo.com/5156903/how-to-hackintosh-a-dell-mini-9-into-the-ultimate-os-x-netbook

Granted it's from 2 years ago, but there's plenty describing hackintoshing the Dell Mini 10v. A quick search found one as recent as Jan 2 this year.

Re:That's 5 minutes of my life I won't get back.

[jedidiah]

> That argument is pretty much dead.
>
> Price an Apple computer against a competitors eq. computer. They will be pretty close.

Depends...

      Can you avoid a form factor that is is prone to escalate costs?

      Can you tune your hardware to fit your solution rather than just being stuck with whatever Apple offers?

If either of those is yes, then Apple has no hope of matching a PC on price.
Being able to put a new GPU into an ancient machine also opens up other interesting possibilities.

Re:That's 5 minutes of my life I won't get back.

[fusiongyro]

They're equivalent to you. To my mom, there is a huge difference. The great thing about this world is that we each get to balance our priorities differently. My Mom hasn't yet found six months to devote to learning Linux, but she has no trouble dumping an extra $400 on a laptop every four years and perhaps an extra $300 on a backup drive every four years. Not much different from me spending $80 on an oil change when the oil probably only costs $20. Priorities.

Re:That's 5 minutes of my life I won't get back.

[frinkster]

Uh. Really? Howabout the MacBook Air? It's basically an Apple Netbook, but they won't call it that. There are plenty of sites explaining how to install MacOS onto price-cheaper Dell and getting basically the same thing. Just Google "Hackintosh Dell".

Base price of a MacBook Air: $1000

Price of a hackintosh-friendly Dell Mini 9: $400

Result: $1000 = $400 * 2.5

Site: http://gizmodo.com/5156903/how-to-hackintosh-a-dell-mini-9-into-the-ultimate-os-x-netbook

Granted it's from 2 years ago, but there's plenty describing hackintoshing the Dell Mini 10v. A quick search found one as recent as Jan 2 this year.

That is ridiculous. The Macbook Air is most definitely underpowered. But comparing it to the Mini 9 & 10v? You are comparing a computer with a Core2Duo to a computer with a single-core Atom (only the newest Dell Minis have dual-core Atoms - but that is still an Atom vs. a C2D).

All that aside, your link has 18 steps to complete. I don't think the average person is going to tackle something like this. By the way, how much are you valuing time? My free time is worth a lot more than my work time, so I better be saving a lot of money by doing this. I'm thinking I would be better off just buying a Macbook Air if what I really want is a Macbook Air.

Re:That's 5 minutes of my life I won't get back.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah. The MacBook Air and the Dell Mini 9 are practically the same machine!

The MacBook Air has a 64GB SSD. The Dell has a 4GB(no, that's not a typo. 4GB) SSD.

The MacBook Air uses a Core CPU. The Dell uses an Atom CPU, and Apple removed support for Atom processors in 10.6.2.

The MacBook Air has an 11.6" screen at 1366 x 768. The Dell has an 8.9" screen at 1024 x 600.

The MacBook Air has 802.11n. You have to pay *extra* to get a wifi card for the Dell, and even then only 802.11g is available.

The MacBook Air has bluetooth standard. You have to pay *extra* to get bluetooth for the Dell.

The MacBook Air comes with 2GB of RAM. The Dell comes with 512MB.

The MacBook Air is about 1/3 thinner than the Dell Mini 9.

The MacBook Air has stereo speakers. The Dell has one speaker.

The MacBook Air comes with a camera. The Dell does not. You can purchase one for extra.

The MacBook Air has NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics. The Dell uses Intel's integrated graphics.

Source:
http://www.apple.com/macbookair/specs.html
http://www.dell.com/us/dfh/p/inspiron-mini9/pd#TechSpec

Re:That's 5 minutes of my life I won't get back.

[UnknowingFool]

The only downside I can seen is that it may not backup as fast as Time Capsule. USB2 isn't going to be fast as SATA unless the Time Capsule has bottlenecks elsewhere.

Re:That's 5 minutes of my life I won't get back.

[fishbowl]

I knew before I got it that my MacBook Pro was a very usable notebook with a sufficiently Unix-like OS to meet my needs, with very efficient power management functions, and with full support for all its devices.
There are no inexpensive notebooks for which I can have all these assurances with the degree of certainty I would need to purchase it blind.

To argue, give me some examples of notebooks in the sub $1000 range which are guaranteed to work with Linux (it doesn't have to be a "written guarantee" type of guarantee, I'll settle for community audits.) "Works with Linux" means no driver incompatibility whatsoever with wireless networking, firewire, audio, or video, and full power management support. Onboard video and audio must be at least as good as the GeForce and the Intel on these things (not a high bar to reach but these are NOT bad, and I've seen MUCH worse). There are some subjective aspects -- I actually *like* the Macbook keyboard and trackpad, the battery life, the portability, and oh yeah, the native OS gives me a proper shell, which is kind of the main thing for me.

So what's out there to compete? There's some value in *knowing* what these things have to offer, as opposed to the hit-or-miss nature of a Linux notebook (even a supported one).

Re:That's 5 minutes of my life I won't get back.

[uglyduckling]

I think USB2 is faster than WiFi, which would be the rate-limiting factor.

Re:That's 5 minutes of my life I won't get back.

[UnknowingFool]

USB2 is not faster than Gigabit Ethernet if you are using the wired connection. As for 802.11n, it may be faster than USB2 as the max speed of both are subject to a range of variables. Also the max theoretical rate for USB2 is 480 mbps, whereas actual rates are lower.

I can build a transmogrifier

[dutchwhizzman]

for much less than that!

Summary

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you have a wireless router with a USB port for external storage, then you can map said external storage to a drive (or volume, as appropriate) on your computer. And then you can use whatever backup solution you have available by pointing at that drive/volume."

Re:Summary

[pz]

Yes, exactly. As a card-carrying Geek, it took me a few days to sort out my DIY rsync-based solution for remote archive that still occasionally spits up. The article said effectively nothing about how difficult that can be to get right, and that's without the nice Apple Time Machine GUI that I keep hearing people going on about. Doing it yourself is not going to give you a foolproof solution.

Re:Summary

[LWATCDR]

Yea this was a bit of a yawn I was expecting custom firmware and maybe a hack to add a SATA port.

Re:Justification?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Try this, instead:

http://www.amahi.org/

Amahi is a Linux appliance that will run on plug computers or nettops. It rocks for these applications. Like Timecapsule on steroids - cos you can add media streaming servers, whatever.

I like the disk pooling. It's like volume management for all the little drives you have scattered about the house.

http://www.amahi.org/tour/disk-pooling

Yes, it handles backups for Mac, Win and Linux - slicker than the setup in this article.

http://www.amahi.org/tour/backups

Seriously

[G3ckoG33k]

Wish wash

A hard drive needs power and a connection.

How much do you need to pimp that to make the Apple fan-girlies understand the function?

Seriously!

Re:Seriously

[jmitchel!jmitchel.co]

Enjoy providing free computer support to your family and friends. I have other priorities.

Re:Seriously

[Mike Buddha]

Buying them Apple stuff does not free you from that responsibility. I can attest from experience. Buying a Mac simply makes it more difficult for you to discern what the problem is.

"When I plug in the USB wire, nothing happens."

Apple is user-friendly, indeed.

Re:Seriously

[Angostura]

Really? You find it difficult to pull up System Profiler Apple >About this Mac > More info and click on USB to see what USB devices the Mac can see?

Either it can see nothing which usually means broken cable, or it can see something unrecognisable, meaning it either isn't supported or needs additonal software from the device manufacturer. Not exactly rocket science.

Re:Seriously

[jedidiah]

Your own response is a confirmation of what the OP just said.

If anything goes wrong, you're pretty much in a Windows style "restart and hope for the best" sort of debugging mode.

That said, using a bash shell can be really handy sometimes. It kind of defeats the entire point of having a Mac, but it's handy.

Re:Seriously

[Anonymous Coward]

"When I plug in the USB wire, nothing happens."

You need to plug the other end of the wire into something too.

Re:Seriously

[Angostura]

No. The OP claimed that it was *more* difficult to discern the problem. The sub-text being that the dumbed-down cutesy GUI prevented you from getting at low level diagnostics.

Better yet

[MrEricSir]

Make your existing Linux server into a Time Machine backup server.

Re:Better yet

[w_dragon]

Time machine at my house backs up onto a windows share. It was painful to set up (although there are tutorials online), but works fine once it gets going.

Or....

[Tsingi]

I have a Netgear WNDR3700 running dd-wrt.

So I plug something into the usb port on that, and voila. Wireless NAS.

Done!

Re:Or....

[spire3661]

Voila! a NAS slower then consumer NAS models from 2006. I get about 1.5 MB/sec to my WNDR3700 reading or writing. Hell i even hooked up my spare SSD to the router jsut for funsies.

Re:Or....

[uiucgrad]

Mod spire up. I did this same setup and and the speed was so slow it was unusable. Time Machine would just crap out after a long long while.

Missing a really cool feature

[MartinSchou]

One of the coolest things about the Time Capsule is the ability to restore OS X from the installation media.

If your system crashes completely or you've just had your hard drive replaced, it's really cool to do the restore directly instead of having to install the OS first, remember what hacks to apply and then restoring it.

Is the Time Capsule expensive? Sure. Is convenience worth it? Possibly.

Re:Missing a really cool feature

[amliebsch]

Possibly not, though. I mean, you can do exactly the same thing with Windows 7, backing up to either any old SMB share, or a USB-connected hard disk(s). Or both.

Re:Missing a really cool feature

[Dynedain]

1) On Win7 you need Pro or higher to do it to a network volume instead of a locally attached drive.
2) Win7 doesn't give you the incredibly intuitive interface for users to locate and restore files themselves.

I have the best of both worlds. Stuck a removable hard drive on the Mini I use as a server, turned on filesharing, and now my Mac laptops can use that drive for TimeMachine, my Windows Media Center can use it for Win7 backup, and the mini itself can use it for TimeMachine as well.

Re:Missing a really cool feature

[amliebsch]

I really don't see what's so un-intuitive about the "Previous Versions" tab, but to each his own, I guess.

Re:Missing a really cool feature

[jimicus]

You can do the same from a supported NAS. Keyword here: supported. But there's no shortage of these.

Re:Missing a really cool feature

[MartinSchou]

Buy an Apple Airport Extreme and plug in your own USB hard drive if you want a slightly cheaper solution than a Time Capsule that still works.

This won't support Time Machine without changing OS X settings, and as such it won't work during installation (unless you're really geeky and know how).

It can work like a Time Capsule, but it doesn't out of the box, and it's not something you can call Apple to get help with if or when it breaks.

RAID is kind of Important

[Zero__Kelvin]

To be entirely honest, portable hard drives are so cheap that it’s almost not worth the hassle of building your own USB enclosure. Empty enclosures cost at least $15 — and today you can get a Western Digital My Book Essential 3TB for $129 from Amazon. You’d be hard pressed to find an internal 3.5 drive $15 less than $129, that’s for sure.

Well, truth be told, I like it when a writer feels free to be entirely honest. The writer overlooks an important point, though, which is that with a DIY drive setup you can use multiple drives and implement RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks)

Re:RAID is kind of Important

[spire3661]

RAID is not a backup, nor is it a needed solution for most home users. The advantage of RAID (in this context) is SPEED in recovery, not true redundancy.

Re:RAID is kind of Important

[mrzaph0d]

he's also neglecting the fact that very few of those drives have anything but a 5400 or even 4200rpm drive in them. at least the 2.5 ones i bought. but since i tend to by 7200 for my laptops anyway, buying an enclosure (discount electronic stores periodically have enclosures on sale for $5-10) and using a drive i had laying around is a lot cheaper, and the drives end up being faster.

Airport Extreme has a USB Port

[Anonymous Coward]

Airport Extreme has a USB Port. Plug in a hard drive. Ta-daaa! Time Capsule.

All of your connected devices can backup wirelessly to the hard drive.

I bought my Airport Extreme on eBay for only slightly more than the price of a regular 802.11n router.

Re:Even with a beefy router...

[kcbnac]

Costs more, but here's an example eSATA/USB2 enclosure with a little 40mm fan, also trayless easy-remove design for quick swapping of drives:

http://www.startech.com/product/SAT3510BU2E-35in-eSATA-USB-Black-SATA-External-Hard-Drive-Enclosure

I've deployed a few of these, they work fairly well. At this point I'm curious when routers will start having USB 3.0 ports on them...

Re:Even with a beefy router...

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

but sticking a disk in a plastic box witih no ventilation and no cooling? Yeah, _no_.

Exactly. I've lost to heat-death enough external USB/Firewire drives mounted in too-tiny boxes to have sworn a mighty oath that I'm never ever buying another. Plus the joy of having yet another wall-wart power supply to find a home for.

So what?

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

I bought my refurbished timecapsule direct from Apple's website for $179 delivered.

Re:So what?

[hedwards]

Here's a hint, backups + refurbished hardware = disaster. If you care enough about your data to back it up, then it ought to mean enough to you to pay for quality media. It doesn't do you a damn bit of good to backup if the backup is on unreliable media.

Re:So what?

[geekoid]

Backups are easy..recovery on the other hand, not so much.

Re:So what?

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

I have bought many refurbed products from Apple.
I would expect more problems from a cheep USB hard drive.

Re:So what?

[jedidiah]

You never trust the media.

That is why having all of your backups on a single piece of media seems so absurd to some of us. A single appliance that holds all of your backups is just asking for trouble. Although RAID or mirroring would mitigate this somewhat. Having only one non-user serviceable drive in a backup appliance is just stupid.

Although having multiple appliances cooperate could be interesting.

Any proper backup should include multiple distinct physical copies.

Re:So what?

[hedwards]

I don't personally, but it is quite a bit more expensive for me to restore the copy that's stored at crashplan than it is for me to restore the copy that's hosted locally. Having a copy online or offsite doesn't do you much good if the meeting is in an hour and you have to download a multigig file.

Re:So what?

[DonM]

Any proper backup should include multiple distinct physical copies.

The Time Capsule makes it quite easy to plug an external USB drive into it and "clone" your backup image onto said drive.

So combining a Time Capsule and a of couple cheap external HDs into a multiple-rotating-offsite-backup-drives scheme is pretty easy.

One bonus is that your computer can be off/sleeping while the TC makes the clone - very handy if your main computer is a laptop which might not be present while the cloning is being done.

Re:So what?

[Slashdot Parent]

Here's a hint, backups + refurbished hardware = disaster. If you care enough about your data to back it up, then it ought to mean enough to you to pay for quality media. It doesn't do you a damn bit of good to backup if the backup is on unreliable media.

OP wants to store the original copy and backup copy of data in the same physical location, and your only complaint is that the backup is on refurb hardware?

When you house catches fire and chars your laptop, you're not going to give a shit if your charred Time Capsule was refurb or not.

Re:Even with a beefy router...

[clarkn0va]

You weren't using NTFS-formatted storage were you? Hint: Linux-based OSs perform a lot better on Linux-native filesystems. Try ext4 or jfs next time.

Re:Even with a beefy router...

[Mike Buddha]

Me too. After hearing all the stories of one year old dead Time Capsules, I went with an outdated ReadyNAS Duo for half the price with a RAID. Of course it don't do wi-fi, but I already had that.

Or, you could do what any real Apple geek would do

[alispguru]

Apple has traditionally overcharged for more capacity (RAM and hard drive space). You ALWAYS buy the smallest model and upgrade it yourself.

1. Buy a 500GB Time Capsule from a third party ($100 and up)
2. Open it up and replace the hard drive with a bigger SATA drive
3. Be amazed as the Time Capsule formats and uses the bigger drive
4. Buy a cheap USB notebook cooling fan and put the Time Capsule on top of it, to make sure the new drive doesn't overheat

Actually, #4 is a good idea with a stock Time Capsule, too.

"Should" Work

[kf6auf]

The cheap options all evaporate as soon as you want a router with the same features as the Time Capsule or the $180 AirPort Extreme (plus BYO external drive); Simultaneous Dual Band and USB looks like it'll run you $120, not $50, from non-Apple brands.

Oh, and "you’ll need to use a little hack [13] to force the new drive to appear in Time Machine. Once it appears, however, your cheap-and-cheerful DIY Time Capsule should function in exactly the same way as the real thing."(emphasis mine) I'm sorry, but what is the point of a backup that should work?

I want a backup that I am confident works; saving $60 isn't worth it.

Re:"Should" Work

[Voyager529]

Well, my personal fave router that I'm saving up for is this nifty ASUS one. At $129 it isn't from the cheap end of the spectrum, but even the one I have now supports dual band and USB at a more wallet-friendly $90, fully half the cost of the Apple kit, and comes with DD-WRT stock.

In either case, the most blaring flaw in your logic is that if the backups don't work, you'll know it VERY quickly at the backup phase. This is extremely preferable when contrasted with finding out in the restore phase. See, if there's an issue at the network or configuration level, the backup software won't be able to point to it in the first place, so when you perform your backup, it'll generally error out immediately, or not begin the backup process in the first place.

Personally, I've already done the bleeding obvious steps in this article - I've got a 3.5TByte FreeNAS where Acronis is humming along and backing up my household computers just wonderfully. It cost more than $200, but it greatly exceeds the capabilities of Time Machine in that it is also a great centralized management unit and is fault tolerant...plus all the ZFS wonderfulness of snapshotting, block level deduplication, etc.

I'd dare say that the ultimate issue with the article is that it wasn't designed for the slashdot crowd. It was designed for the general populous who isn't as acutely aware that there are alternatives to Time Machine. On the other side, the steps were very generic and broad, so it isn't really written for them, either :/

Re:"Should" Work

[LoganDzwon]

The great thing about PCs is that your stuck with a dozen or more half-baked solutions, none of which actually work as well as the single solution Apple provides for it's customers? I think you and I disagree on the definition of "great."

Re:"Should" Work

[Just Some Guy]

So, you are more confident in a consumer-level blackbox made by a company with whom you lack an ongoing buisness relationship, than something you made yourself?

In this specific case, I am. I am more confident that Apple's shiny, proprietary backup program will play nicely with Apple's shiny, proprietary backup hardware than I am that I can convince the former that my home fileserver really is the latter.

Re:hard disk

[hedwards]

A better idea would be using one of these with crashplan. Basically make that the onsite backup and do the offsite backup somewhere else. I personally do something similar with my computers so that if I need to restore a large file, I can do it locally. Pretty much the only case in which I'm going to need to do a remote restore is if something happens to the local backup.

Re:Even with a beefy router...

[InvisiBill]

I'm not sure about the newer models, but previous routers were known for having very slow (like 2MB/s) USB access. Obviously this isn't quite the same problem if you're actually seeing resource exhaustion, but it is a common issue that someone just techy enough to follow these instructions could run into.

Re:Even with a beefy router...

[spire3661]

While a good question, im curious as to when these routers will be able support anywhere near USB 3.0 throughput.

Time, Effort, Warranty = $$

[Mn3m0nic]

I don't have a Time Capsule, but I can say that the time and effort involved in a homebrew version would tack on to that 200 price tag. Also, the warranty and support you get from Apple far outmatch Western Digital, TigerDirect (shudder), etc. I learned a long time ago that sometimes you have to spend a little extra money to avoid a lot of extra headache down the road. This goes for many things in life.

Re:Time, Effort, Warranty = $$

[Mn3m0nic]

If you are in the category of shoppers that would even consider buying something from Apple like this, then yes, support is a BIG factor. That was the point I was trying to make with regards to warranty.

Re:Time, Effort, Warranty = $$

[UnknowingFool]

I suppose in your world all electronics work 100% of the time and no one ever has to replace a failed unit for any reason. In my world stuff happens. That's why warranties exist.

BFD: Use git+ssh+Debian on NSLUG

[npsimons]

This is vaguely interesting, but shouldn't be news to anyone here; I suspect most of us have had this capability via rsync|git+ssh+a barebones UNIX/Linux server for decades. I know I have. For the rest of you (including Time Capsule users), welcome to the 1990's :-)

Re:BFD: Use git+ssh+Debian on NSLUG

[Slashdot Parent]

What's the throughput rate on an NSLUG to a USB external drive? I feel like backups might be a little painful on such a device.

But more importantly, when your house catches fire and chars your computer, how are you going to get the data off your charred NSLUG?

Re:Justification?

[Abstrackt]

I like the disk pooling. It's like volume management for all the little drives you have scattered about the house.

Apparently the disk pooling is done by Greyhole. It seems quite novel in that you get JBOD with user-selectable redundancy, a "JBOD concatenation storage pool" as the author calls it. I might finally have found a home for all those old IDE drives I have laying around!

Re:Or, you could do what any real Apple geek would

[spire3661]

Did you forget that time is money? What you described is AT BEST a one hour job, with it quite possibly taking longer along with research if everything doesnt go exactly right (o look 3TB is an Advanced Format Drive, will it work? is it supported etc etc). The point is, sometimes its jsut cheaper to buy whole solutions then to putter around for 8 hours trying to save $100.

Pathetic...

[Fitch]

If you have a wireless access point of some sort (and what home these days doesn't?) what the hell's the point of this article? In three sentences, let me summarize it for those who don't want their precious time wasted.

Go buy a cheap NAS box sans hard drive for $40, install a cheap / spare hard drive and plug into existing router / network. Use existing backup software on your winblows machines to backup to the SMB share. Post lame article on slashdot that will irritate the technically competent.

This is slashdot, not the official Cult of Apple fanboi site. Gawd... I seriously take issue with the gay Apple logo photoshopped onto the Linksys router.

Re:hard disk

[Angostura]

What are the odds that they will fail at exactly the same time as your desktop?

Pay attention, McFly

[Zero__Kelvin]

"RAID is not a backup, nor is it a needed solution for most home users. The advantage of RAID (in this context) is SPEED in recovery, not true redundancy."

I never claimed RAID was a backup system, however a backup system has, as one of its constituent parts, a storage subsystem. That subsystem can leverage RAID. "The" advantage of RAID depends on what RAID level or combination is used.

Re:Even with a beefy router...

[admiralranga]

one of the more useful mods ive done to my pc was attaching one of those car universal adaptors thingies to the 12 volt line i.e. 12 in one side 12 to 3.3v out the other with a selection of interchangable tips

Re:Justification?

[FunkyELF]

I'm not familiar with any of these other apps listed on here, but why would you have to pay to run a MediaWiki server?
Who are you paying for this?

http://www.amahi.org/tour/apps

Other than that... it looks nice and clean.

Re:Or, you could do what any real Apple geek would

[jedidiah]

Unless you've got a magic money making machine, time really is not money.

Re:Justification?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Not paying anyone.

Download, install, go.

They do have Internet or "Cloud" services you can optionally pay to use. I'm sure that this cloud-mirroring and whatnot are clever web-service adaptors in front of Amazon S3.

Missed the point

[surfcow]

The computer / network is just a tool that lets me do the stuff I need to do.

I *know* I could make a better time machine / mouse trap / etc. And it would be cheaper. I know.

I willingly pay a premium so I don't have to mess with that crap. That's the same reason I have a newer, reliable car - instead of one I built myself from parts. I don't want a lifestyle, I want a reliable tool. I'm an IT pro, I mess with tech for a living, not a hobby.

Companies like Apple sell more than just hardware, they sell integration and consistent design. Sometimes you really can pay for convenience. For me, it's worth it. My time is not free.

Re:Or, you could do what any real Apple geek would

[Nerdfest]

Recently Apple has been using proprietary connectors and firmware on their disks that don't allow then to report their thermal info like normal disks. If this is the case with the Time Machine as well, then you can't replace the disks yourself unless you don't mind your fans running at full speed at all times.

Re:Or, you could do what any real Apple geek would

[frinkster]

A job is magic? I know times are tough these days, but I didn't think they were that bad.

Time Machine is nice but it has a annoying flaw

[SilverJets]

The one problem I have with Time Machine is the fact that you have to exclude instead of include directories to back up. So if you only want a couple of things backed up, you have to sit there and exclude everything else. Stupid. Apple should have a simple toggle -- include all or not and if not you list want you want included. They way they have it now is back-asswards.

Re:Time Machine is nice but it has a annoying flaw

[Relayman]

Sorry, but the default should be to back up everything. Your plan would make it too easy to skip something important.

Inflation my arse.

[blair1q]

$500 for 3 TB sounds like a decent deal to me. And that's just for the bytes.

I have a couple of 500-GB disks I bought in a bunch when Fry's dropped the price to $179 each a few years ago. I never did get around to needing them in any hardware, but I felt so cool getting them cheap.

Half a dozen of those would have cost over a kilobuck.

And wouldn't come with wireless networking, or even a case.

There are people engaging in the continuing argument over the state of the economy who claim that inflation is high. Anyone doing so is cherrypicking their consumption. The 3% reported by the BLS is about right.

I can do it for 5$

[Syberz]

1. Tin lunch box

2. Stuff

3. Shovel

4. ???

5. Profit?!

There, easy. When did we start calling backups "time capsules"?

Re:Or, you could do what any real Apple geek would

[UnknowingFool]

There was one source about the proprietary firmware thing and they said something to the effect that it must be proprietary since they didn't figure it out in the new iMacs released in May. Users on forums said while the power plug wasn't standard they were able to use off the shelf HDDs as long they grounded the extra pins or something like that.

For even cheaper

[bgspence]

Buy the $129 Amazon 3TB drive and plug it into a USB port with a USB cable the same color as your carpet.

OK, it isn't really wireless, but most of the suggestions in the article aren't really a '3TB Wireless Time-Machine', either if you drop other '3TB Wireless Time-Machine' features.

Re:Or, you could do what any real Apple geek would

[willy_me]

Actually, #4 is a good idea with a stock Time Capsule, too.

Yup, the first couple generations of Time Capsules where prone to failure. They ran hot, and it wasn't because of the disk. This is now supposed to be fixed, but I no longer see the value in a Time Capsule. Tried a WD My Book Live - the thing screams. Performed a backup at 40MB/s - that is the real life write speed of the device. And reading is supposed to be in the 60-80 MB/s range, but I never tested it. How was WD able to make a device so cheap, so fast, while using so little power? Oh, and it runs Linux and supports SSH without any hacking.

Re:Justification?

[iamhassi]

Actually this hacker "time capsule" sounds a lot like crashplan but far more complicated. Crashplan simply backs up one computer to another. No routers with USB or external hard drives necessary, just two computers with an internet connection and this free software installed and you're done. I use it to backup the laptops to the desktop, haven't had to restore yet but so far so good, it's automated so I don't even notice it running.

SugarSync might be good too but I haven't used them in a few years.

I'll take the lack of cables thanks.

[lerxstz]

Sure you can make your own. But can you fit it into the same size/footprint of the time capsule. Nope. Can you make it without all the messy cables hanging all over the place, and adapters, and power cords? Not really. Will it require more than 1 outlet?

The time capsule may be a bit over priced, but the functionality *and* design make it worth it to me. Nothing wrong with the DIY method, but it's nowhere as neat of a solution.

My solution

[fishbowl]

I really like my Drobo and rsync.

Re:My solution

[wilson_c]

Ah, the Slowbo. Hopes were high for Drobo when it first appeared, but in my experience it regularly had slower throughput for RAID 5 (or Drobo's closest equivalent) drives than I would get for a single drive. Fine for low bandwidth backups, but not the low-cost enterprise-performance they sell themselves as.

Form factor

[tepples]

Can you avoid a form factor that is is prone to escalate costs?

Sometimes I can't. If I'm going to be building a home theater PC, for example, I need a case no bigger than a typical game console. A Mac mini is comparable in size to a Dreamcast or Wii, while most PCs sold at Best Buy are far bigger than an original Xbox 360.

Can you tune your hardware to fit your solution rather than just being stuck with whatever Apple offers?

Building a PC from parts means you need the more expensive retail Windows, not OEM Windows.

Re:Or, you could do what any real Apple geek would

[fishbowl]

If you do have a magic money making machine, time spent with it turned off is zero cash.

DIY TM-style backup with MacBooks

[markjhood2003]

I've tried the DIY approach with my MacBooks and was never able to get reliable backups in the face of my household (including myself) closing and sleeping or shutting down the laptops in the middle of a backup. I finally got a Time Capsule and all those problems disappeared.

My guess is that the Time Capsule firmware along with AFP and Apple's native file systems all incorporate a lot of work into making Time Machine backups across WiFi from intermittently available computers a lot more reliable.

OTOH, I've not had any luck using the Time Capsule as a backup share for Windows 7. The Win7 Backup and Restore refuses to backup to a remote file system unless it's been formatted as NTFS. Norton Ghost doesn't work either, as apparently Time Capsule's Samba implementation has a 2GB limitation on the size of individual files, and full disk image backups are much larger than that.

So yes, I'm stuck with two separate backup solutions for the house. Thanks Apple and Microsoft!

What problem does this solve?

[wilson_c]

So, if I invest a few hundred dollars worth of my time, I can save a few hundred dollars creating a roughly equivalent system? What exactly is the downside of just buying a Time Capsule again?

We're talking home users here right?

[fishbowl]

More than a backup system, many home and small biz users need organization and discipline. You might have a few terabytes of data, but I'll bet a tiny fraction of that is needed to keep you out of jail, keep you from losing customers, or keep the IRS from seizing your real estate. I'll go as far as to suggest that for many people that's a floppy disc's worth of information. But for want of a reliable, quick and convenient way to backup a terabyte, many people still go without the ability to recover from a disaster because that tiny amount of critical information is buried in the noise. I see this phenomenon at the corporate level, to scale. Picture multiple HP LTO jukeboxes at multiple facilities with tapes being sent offsite daily. In all that data, how much is really important to business continuity, and how much is noise? (Most of it is noise, but separating signal from noise is labor intensive and often is a matter of opinion, so it all gets backed up.) Now when you have an SLA that requires you do do something that's staggeringly expensive (if possible), these decisions still get made, just not necessarily in a disciplined way.

Re:Justification?

[WuphonsReach]

Apparently the disk pooling is done by Greyhole. It seems quite novel in that you get JBOD with user-selectable redundancy, a "JBOD concatenation storage pool" as the author calls it. I might finally have found a home for all those old IDE drives I have laying around!

Well, other then the fact that you'll be spending lots to hook up all those old IDE drives, plus the electricity to keep them spinning. And the heat, and the noise.

2TB 3.5" SATAs are only about $80.

Only use for older 3.5" IDE/SATA drives is *maybe* to stick them in an external USB case. And even then, only if they're over 200GB. Otherwise, may as well donate them and buy a little 2.5" 750GB USB3 drive. (By the time you find a 3.5" USB case that takes IDE drives and doesn't require some proprietary power connector / brick... those cases are rare.)

Other advantage of the external 2.5" drives, you can leave them unhooked until you need something off of them.

Re:Even with a beefy router...

[WuphonsReach]

Eh - I've had my fill of 40mm fans. They're almost more of a panacea then an actual cooling solution. Minimum size is really 60-80mm. And good luck finding a 3.5" external USB case that provides that.

For down-and-dirty hooking up of SATA drives, look at the Thermaltake BlacX units. Drop the SATA drive in and turn it on. Just make sure you have some sort of fan to blow air over the drive as it sits there.

But if you're totally stuck on using external USB drives, just switch to the 2.5" sized units. Since laptop drives have never had active cooling, they tend to survive a bit better (and don't generate as much heat) then their larger 3.5" brethren. Biggest issue in the 2.5" size is power, which I think is mostly taken care of with USB3.

"beautiful" but not practical

[stickyboot]

Apple time capsules seem like a good idea until you actually think about what its function is, and how it was implemented. Any backup device that does not allow physical access to the storage medium is a mean, practical joke. Add in a faulty power supply that routinely dies in 18 months, its a cruel joke at that, and its exactly what a time capsule is! Networked storage devices are awesome, and a great thing to have around, but to call a backup solution that routinely dies, overheats, and prevents the end user access to the storage medium when the wrapper breaks does not count as a beautiful device.