I’m a huge fan of my Time Capsule. Once an hour, both my MacBook Pro and Air machines are backed-up automatically via wifi without me having to do a thing. As a wise friend once observed, the only 100 percent reliable backup system is one where you don’t have to do a thing – not even plug in a drive.
But there’s no denying that at $299 for the 2TB model or $399 for the 3TB model, the Time Capsule isn’t cheap. You can buy a 2TB external hard drive for well under $100 or a 3TB one for slightly more. You’d normally need a more expensive NAS system to make it work via wifi, but Remy van Elst has created an instructible enabling you to do it with nothing more than a $35 Raspberry Pi.
You’ll need to be comfortable with command lines, and it will take you a little time to get it all configured, but at the end of it all you’ll have a working Time Capsule – that looks to OS X just like the real thing – for somewhere around $120.
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USB attached storage to the RaspPi? No thanks. Just wait until that thing has to rebuild itself or do any kind of ops that aren’t constrained by your network. Buy a used Time machine and replace the drive with a higher capacity model.
For me, it’s a combination of locally attached drives, and CrashPlan Pro. CrashPlan provides me with real disaster recovery while Time Machine gives me a faster method of restoring a system that I’ve just erased and reinstalled. CrashPlan usually backs up changed files more quickly, since it kicks in every 15 minutes, instead of every hour. My Mac mini has a backup drive always plugged in, and I plug my MacBook Pro into its backup drive each night and let Power Nap work its magic. I’ve also noticed that CrashPlan seems to work via Power Nap as well. I really don’t care for Time Capsules because for one thing…. as the writer has pointed out, they’re expensive, and second, they’ve been woefully unreliable for a lot of my customers.
Up and running already for last one year or so. Few glitches but works great.
Wow! This is awesome! Did not know Raspberry pi could do that…
So, I couldn’t get this to work, however, I was able to use this and got it working: https://www.mikepalmer.net/build-a-netatalk-time-machine-for-osx-lion-using-debian-6-0-squeeze/