Computer Note (and Front Flip) (OT)

When is a time capsule not a time capsule? When it's a Time Capsule

Whew! Well that was a narrow thing, and nervvy. I became aware about a week ago that my main backup drive, a 3-TB Apple "Time Capsule," had developed hardware failure of unknown extent and unforseeable consequence; the discovery put me on notice, and on edge. The Time Capsule is  a Wi-Fi router with a hard drive in it for making automatic backups using Time Machine, "Time Machine" being the backup software application that comes with the Apple macOS computer operating system. The two are designed to work together, seamlessly and easily and without bothering anyone, which, when things are going well, they do. Anyway, I received the replacement Time Capsule a few days ago, and yesterday and last night completed copying the data and swapping in the replacement. I can't say that it was a huge risk at any time, but it made me anxious all the same...one of those things that seems large when it's looming over your head...you know. The actual task was less of a hassle than I thought it would be when I was reading the how-to page, which gave me the cold sweats.

I've mentioned before that one of the reasons I got into photography in the 1980s was so I wouldn't have to work with computers. That's gone well.

I give Apple very high marks for customer service. They sent a replacement Time Capsule under warranty (it's possible they won't accept the old one as a return, because I wrote on it to remind myself which cable goes where—if so, that will prove a very expensive mistake), and then a Senior Applecare Advisor walked me through the procedure of making the switch.

...And it worked. I feel like doing a front flip!

...And speaking of which, and while we're off topic, you must see this absurd yet amazing thing:

The remarkable event happens following the two-minute mark, so either skip ahead or hang in there. Granted, he wrecks the truck immediately afterward, but the feat is astonishing all the same.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm going to guess that things like monster trucks and tractor pulls are a peculiarly American thing, and that they don't have this sort of thing in Britain, or Switzerland, or, say, down on the French Riviera. What you might not realize is that the ritual seems equally peculiar and foreign to certain classes of Americans as well. The primary audience is apparently little boys, to whom a monster truck rally includes pretty much everything that's important in life.

Back to work now, Mike.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Eric Rose: "Both my brothers-in-law are huge into tractor pulls up here in Alberta. Since they are farmers by trade they just happen to have a few tractors to play with. They prefer the old ones. I think half the fun for them is restoring the old beasts and seeing them beat the new stuff."

Dogman: "I bought a Time Capsule last year at the same time as the new iMac. It replaced my previous backup device...nothing. Nothing since both backup drives on my old Mac Mini died at the same time, likely due to a storm that caused power spikes.

"About three months ago, the Capsule started making loud, screeching noises. It actually woke me up one night the noise was so loud. Being the computer-knowledgeable, handy type, I whacked the damn thing real hard and then laid it down on its side. It stopped screeching so I could sleep but I was pretty sure it was only a temporary fix. Turns out, it quieted down. That made me think it might have quit working but it has been functioning like new while still being silent. At the time, I switched it from automatic backups to manual so I now do backups when I remember it. I thought this might extend the life of the machine but I guess that's debatable. Anyway, all is well for the time being.

"Looking into the issue on the 'Net indicated to me that the noise might have been due to an accumulation of dust around the cooling fan—we live in a house built in the 1930s that has been constantly recirculating dust from the Roosevelt Administration. Whacking the Capsule hard might actually have shook the dust loose and fixed the problem.

"Or not."

Bruce McL: "Carbon Copy Cloner. Buy an external hard drive and clone your Mac HD with Carbon Copy Cloner. I don't say this lightly. I've been a Mac Consultant for many years. Time Machine does a good job of archiving—saving copies of old stuff. CCC does an excellent job of backing up. You can plug a hard drive cloned with CCC into any Mac and run the Mac from that drive. All of your settings, all of your apps, everything will be there and will work. Time Machine does not do that. Restoring a complete system from Time Machine is more difficult. I have three backup hard drives that I clone with CCC. I alternate between two of the drives each week, and the third one is in a safe deposit box in my bank. I swap that out every two or three months. If you want to save a little money, you can buy bare 3.5 inch internal HDs and run them in a Voyager hard drive dock."

Gordon Lewis: "I'm trying hard not to reveal my biases, but what the hell: Are you really at such loose ends in Penn Yan, New York that you've resorted to watching monster truck demos on YouTube? I suspect it's time for a small group of your most devoted readers to knock on your door and deliver a much-needed intervention."

Mike replies: It was clickbait on or near a Jay Leno's Garage video, and I do watch those sometimes when I'm at loose ends. I'm a big fan of Jay Leno...not particularly as a talk show host, and not particularly as a comedian, but as a great car guy.

Comments

[KeithB]

I love Time Machine! I hang out on the Apple boards and we always get people asking how to get there photos back after a crash. When we say "restore from backup" we just get a stunned silence.

Before I had Time Machine my wife had an incident that caused us to lose a lot of photos. Never again.

I wonder if Monster Trucks are a natural outgrowth of Tractor Pulls?

[MartinP]

I don't have any Apple products, so I don't understand their nomenclature, but this Time Capsule thing is some sort of backup device that contains a single hard-drive? The failure rate of hard-drives is 100%, so it seems a very strange design for such a system to contain only one drive.

The rest of the I.T. world uses network-attached storage containing multiple drives, having the data mirrored across more than a single drive and with constant error-checking. Is it not wise to get rid of the Time Capsule to replace it with something more standard and with increased reliability?

[R. Edelman]

Mike, check out what they do in Iceland with extreme hill climbs.

[Peter Wright]

You have probably been told this many times before, but Time Machine is not really intended as a backup solution, more a way of finding files that were deleted and now are wanted back. There is no substitute for having a full clone of your working drive. I use (as well as Time Machine) the App, Carbon Copy Cloner to have two cloned (& bootable) external disk drives, one of which is always off-site.

My photograph library is large and so is on an external drive which is copied by ChronoSync to two other external drives (again, one is always off-site). Most people don't do this, but most people eventually loose their data – probably the final demise of 99.9% of todays photographs.

[Speed]

As a child, my father took me to horse pulling, tractor pulling, stock car races and demolition derbies at the (small, very rural) county fair. Not things we had in the big city. Fond memories.

Monster trucks (and tractor pulls) are very loud -- especially inside an arena. Wear ear protection.

[David Zivic]

Two comments today. Your extensive files being saved and secure are valuable to all of us as you refer to them often on your posts. The other comment is a reference to the front flip with the car and the "sport" in general. "Tractor Pulls are for those who can't undertand the rules of wrestling".

[Jim]

One word (and a question mark): Offsite?

A few more words: Mike, do you have offsite backups as well as your Time Capsule? Could you recover (most of) your data if, say, a crook broke in a decided to pocket the shiny Apple-embossed doohicky along with the computer, or if there were some form of fire of flood damage to your home?

[Rodolfo Canet]

I don't know in other countries, but here in Spain we link inmediately monster trucks -well, everything 'monster'- with USA, even if shows of this kind appear routinely every year -mainly at Christmas- in the main cities.

[Dennis]

OK - I guess the little boys thing makes sense (probably big boys and beer, too) ... it was pretty impressive, but equally astonishing that that many people gather to watch trucks drive around. For a prolonged period of time. I enjoyed it, but a 2 1/2 minute video was enough for me. These people had to (presumably) buy tickets, drive there, park, wait in line to get in, sit and watch the event for who knows how long, wait in line to get out, then drive home. And there are a lot of them !

[Stephen Scharf]

Every time capsule I have owned, and I've owned three, have all failed on me. I'm going to get a Drobo and have Time Machine back up to that, instead. Sorry, Apple, three strikes and you're out.

[SteveW]

And then there is this: https://www.thrillist.com/news/nation/mrgear-shoots-wd-40-cans-with-a-gun

Only in America.

[Sylvain G.]

Mike,

Believe it or not but some obscure powers managed to import Monster Truck under the Monster Jam name/competition here in Europe. I think two times over a decade just in ... Belgium. Not sure how they marketed it by I know I was sad not to see it advertised "the proper way" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohp_nmI_TFA (contains mildly offensive parodic elements).
Great front flip indeed.

[Eric Brody]

Mike, I'm sure this post will generate comments from people far more qualified than I am, but here are my thoughts on your potential near disaster. Time Machine is all well and good but you should also have a backup with a bootable clone, a bootable mirror image of your disk. Read Lloyd Chambers blog about Time Machine failures. In fact, you should have multiple bootable clone backups with at least one stored off site, at a friend's, wherever. I'm not much of a mathematician but do know one thing, all hard drives will fail, at some point. There is a significant difference between having one and two backups based on the probability of failure. How often to back up is based on your personal tolerance for risk. The value of cloud backup is arguable, some love it, some don't, but hard drive backup is now easy and relatively inexpensive. I am a lone amateur photographer and choose to back up my images every night, at 3AM, automatically, with a program called Carbon Copy Cloner, there are others such as Super Duper, that do the same thing. Though they likely have little monetary value, these images are extraordinarily important to me.

[Stanleyk]

If you had your photos in negative sleeves on your shelf you wouldn't have to worry... :-)

[Bruce McL]

Carbon Copy Cloner. Buy an external hard drive and clone your Mac HD with Carbon Copy Cloner.

I don't say this lightly. I've been a Mac Consultant for many years.

Time Machine does a good job of archiving - saving copies of old stuff.

CCC does an excellent job of backing up. You can plug a hard drive cloned with drive into any Mac and run the Mac from that drive. All of your settings, all of your apps, everything will be there and will work. Time Machine does not do that. Restoring a complete system from Time Machine is more difficult.

I have three backup hard drives that I clone with CCC. I alternate between two of the drives each week, and the third one is in a safe deposit box in my bank. I swap that out every 2 or 3 months.

If you want to save a little money, you can buy bare 3.5 inch internal HDs and run them in a Voyager hard drive dock.

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/NewerTech/Voyager/Hard_Drive_Dock

[Sal Santamaura]

...it's possible they won't accept the old one as a return, because I wrote on it to remind myself which cable goes where—if so, that will prove a very expensive mistake...

Did you write on the old one with a Sharpie? If so, use a piece of white paper towel moistened with some isopropyl alcohol to completely remove your scribbles. :-)

[Anthony Shaughnessy]

I think tractor pulling is also big in some of the scandinavian countries.
Anthony

[Clayton]

Not sure about new models, but older versions would work with Windows. My only venture into Apple resulted from an Ebay purchase gone wrong- I got a Time Machine instead of a GPS unit. It worked well for a few months until when it crashed. Being in Venezuela at the time it was not worth the hassle to have it fixed. I do wonder about removing the drive to recover the data.

[Tom Burke]

Good news on the Time Capsule, Mike. I use Time Machine, but always to a couple of stand-alone drives; I've never used the Apple Time Capsule device.

Monster trucks - are they street-legal in the US?

[SF Murph]

Moster Trucks exist in Switzerland. You can even go for a ride on one!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvGQTXGRlSM

[John]

Correcting you: tractor pulls and monster trucks exist in other countries as well. In Holland, a monster truck event went awfully wrong a few years back and the truck slammed into the crowd, killing three and injuring many others.

[Tim Bradshaw]

You can make archives of time capsules which is easy to do: if you have a big cheap disk (cheap because it doesn't need to be fast, it just needs to work) then it's worth doing that.

Ideally buy two such disks and alternate them, since you need to erase the disk before running the backup.

It is not possible to have too many backups.

[Euan Forrester]

I have a bit over 4TB of photos, and after too many years of not having proper backups I finally bit the bullet and came up with a solution that works for me.

I bought a Network-Attached Storage box (https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1215992-REG/synology_diskstation_ds416j.html, and put 2 8TB drives in it (https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1237919-REG/wd_wd80efzx_8tb_red_5400_rpm.html). The data on there is written to both drives (RAID-1), so if either drive fails I have everything on the other -- even edits that I did seconds ago. Then I bought 2 more 8TB drives and enclosures (http://www.vantecusa.com/en/product/view_detail/602), and set up a backup program (https://www.econtechnologies.com/chronosync/overview.html) to backup everything on the NAS box onto each of them. I keep one at home, and the other at my office, and rotate them whenever I dump new photos onto the NAS box. That way I always have a backup off-site in case anything happens in my home.

It was expensive to buy the harddrives, but my plan is that when I run out of room I can re-use them by putting the other 2 drives into the NAS box and which will then have 16TB of storage. By then I hope that 16TB drives will be affordable, and so I’ll buy 2 of those for my off-site backup. Once all that fills up (I don’t expect that to happen for many years) I’ll maybe buy a NAS box that can hold more drives, and then just stick them all in it.

For my actual computer I use Time Machine for an on-site backup, and CrashPlan (https://store.crashplan.com/store/) for an off-site backup.

I think I remember you saying that you’ve put these Time Machine capsules in the basement when they’re full, but then found later that you couldn’t get data off them. Harddrives don’t like to sit unused, and I try to think of my data as swinging from trapeze to trapeze rather than sitting in cold storage somewhere. With this solution, all the drives are being constantly used, so if something fails I’ll know right away and I can replace it immediately and easily just by swapping in a blank drive.

[Scott]

Looks like you may have gotten your replacement just in time. This seems to be a product category that Apple is abandoning:

http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/11/21/apple-axes-router-division-apparently-signaling-the-end-of-airport

"Citing unnamed sources within Apple, Bloomberg reported on Monday that the former AirPort engineers are now working on other teams, including Apple TV development.

"The internal changes would suggest that Apple has no plans to update its lineup of routers, including the AirPort Extreme, Time Capsule, and AirPort Express. Apple's portable AirPort Express has not seen an update to the latest 802.11ac wireless standard, remaining available with last-generation 802.11n performance."

[This is Apple's biggest problem...they abandon their customers. Routinely and inevitably. They've been doing it for years, in all sorts of ways with all sorts of products. It's gotten so I don't trust them about this sort of thing. --Mike]

[John Shriver]

At least in the previous version of the Time Capsule, Steve Jobs insisted that it have no air vents. There was a fan in it, but all it served to do was keep the entire unit evenly overheated. Some twit at Apple picked a power supply with electrolytic capacitors only rated for 55 degrees C, instead of the higher 85 degree rating that is available. The capacitors get weak from the heat, the power supply starts to get unstable, and the disk drive starts to get write errors. This happened to mine, I had it replaced under warranty. But I lost faith in it, and stopped using it for Time Machine backup as soon as AppleCare expired. I kept using it for WiFI for a couple of years.

I now just use an external USB 3TB hard drive for Time Machine. It might even be USB 3.0.

But I do consider Time Machine "real backup", even if it does more than that (lost file retrieval). The Mac OS install software will gladly restore the user file and environment from a Time Machine backup on either AirPort or external disk.

As others here note, I also use a rotating set of 1TB USB hard drives for offsite backups, using SuperDuper.

[Bruce Vermeychuk]

Mike -
Consider an on-line backup in addition to your Time Capsule. I can heartily recommend BackBlaze (www.backblaze.com). Five bucks a month for unlimited backup and it's all automagic in the background. As they say, "Kiss your lost files hello!"

[Eliott James]

Got to have several back up drives for your most important files (photos, writings, etc) and then a bootable drive back up so you can get up and running again in case the main drive fails. It's important to also have a drive that can be stored off location. (In case of fire, flood or theft.)

Drives are cheap and software can do the backups or you can do them manually.

Really.

[Robert e]

I know well the anxiety caused by a failing hard drive. It's more or less inevitable, moreso as the drive gets older, so best to be prepared, with backups and replacement cycles.

Now that I've learned that lesson, though, I've been plagued by failing video hardware. Can't ever be easy!

[Michael Perini]

Mike, I'm sure others will have said similar things, but a single time machine is not really a backup.
The Simplest next step, though still incomplete, is to buy another 3-4 TB Hard drive and create a second Time Machine backup. Time machine software makes it simple.
A better solution is to use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your boot drive and your other main storage drive. CCC can even do automatic incremental backups just like Time Machine.
An added benefit, is that if you have computer problems, you can just boot from the clone and be on your way.
But frankly, you need stuff offsite as well.
The Western Digital 'My Cloud' NAS products especially the RAID 1 units are dead simple to configure and offer redundancy.
Check out cloud storage.
You got a free wake-up call with no data loss, -you hardly ever get 2 of those.

[John Camp]

Here in Santa Fe, we have Mazda RX-5 pulls. The competition draws huge crowds.

[FrankB]

Mike, that looks like a great thing to do with your next Miata... just add some big tires, you can start a new movement. You can put your "time machine" in the passenger seat (you will probably be ready to crush the thing after it fails on you).

[Curiously, I just saw a Miata in the parking lot at the grocery store--nice warm day today--and it had big tires on it. Not remotely as big as monster struck tires, even proportionately, but they were much beefier than stock, and it did make me wonder if that Miata might have been a V8 conversion. I hoped I might run into the owner on the way out but when I returned the car was gone. --Mike]

[Bahi]

Are you already watching Harry’s Garage?

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIB5XXHNAWWzTOw6guIMYCg

If not, set aside a few days. Harry’s great—like Jay, he’s a true car guy.

(Sorry about my earlier attempt to post a comment – seems like I mistyped some html.)

[T. Edwards]

You know what makes me very nervous: reading about somebody using only one backup.

For heavens sake, get a couple of 4TB drives and set them both up for time capsule and swap them every couple of weeks. They're about $120 bucks each on Amazon.

And put one in a safety deposit box or somewhere safe outside of your house. What happens when your house burns down with your computer AND backups sitting 3 feet apart.

Please, do it!

[Bryce Lee]

I have yet to have any Apple Time Capsule last more than a year before it dies. Absolute garbage.
The supplied Time machine backs up to to two different back up drives, when they get fill, I replace them.

[Kenneth Tanaka]

Regarding backups I strongly second Bruce McL's suggestion. It's the general process I've been following for nearly 15 years. Continuous live backups are best for restoring individual files or sets from an erroneous deletion of mistake. But it's not terrific for restoring your system drive.

In my case I've been using SuperDuper rather CC Cloner. But they're equivalent. Hard drives are inexpensive enough to have multiple backups. Run them overnight.

[Joe]

Yes, yes, yes to what Bruce McL said. Time Capsule is great for recovering a file you've written over or trashed, and I've used mine many times for those situations. But it's a second-best backup solution if you need to replace an entire drive. CCC.

[Tim]

Mike

Like many of your correspondents I use NAS for storing photo's and documents, but having also experienced a NAS failure, I took the precaution of subscribing to Amazon Glacier. This takes a backup of selected folders into a remote Amazon cloud store. The way this works is that Amazon charge you pennies per month for huge amounts of storage, but will hit you with a larger (but not insane) bill for retrieval. This is my "if all else fails" mechanism..

Tim

[Bob Johnston]

I just thought that I should say how much this little boy (68 this year) enjoyed the monster truck clip. I can't wait to show this to my five year old grandchild who is crazy about cars. Things sure have changed regarding children. We do have monster trucks and tractor pulls over here but they are usually confined to shows where the main concern of the driver is to preserve his truck intact for the next show.

[Bob Rosinsky]

It's wise to have a backup offsite. The "Cloud" is subject to Internet interruptions, a single box for backup sometimes chokes, and a nice 3 TB external hard drive will accommodate quarterly backups. I recommend WD enterprise drives. They are robust and warrantied for five years. They will fit in a safe deposit box. Buy a separate docking/cloning station for the drive (about $40). One last is to use a My Passport with the backup software for regularly and automatically backing up select folders. If it is possible to make an image of the OS and main drive, as is possible on PCs, I'd suggest that too.

[Earl Dunbar]

@ Bryce Lee: My Time Capsule drive(s) and Time Machine backups have been rock steady.

[Yoram]

If you search for Eurosport tractor pulling you will find a lot of stuff.
I was quite addicted to this show once upon a time when I had a tv