Does anyone still use the Time Capsule as their wireless router? If not, what are you using instead?
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Airport Time Capsule
- Thread starter Soulflower
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I still use a 2015 Airport Extreme, which aren't sold any longer. You might some useful suggestions in this thread:
forums.macrumors.com
Edited to add: I also still have a first gen Time Capsule, which I use as a Time Machine backup sometimes when I have a Mac. Still works like a champ for wireless backups.
Best Router to buy now since Airport Extreme no longer available?
I noticed that this is not the 802.11ax standard. Is that a big deal? I often turn off my wireless and just use ethernet with my Airport Express. Is this router able to shut off the wifi and use only the ethernet connected Lan ports? Will the router temporarily disconnect computers connected...
forums.macrumors.com
Edited to add: I also still have a first gen Time Capsule, which I use as a Time Machine backup sometimes when I have a Mac. Still works like a champ for wireless backups.
im Still using an AirPort Extreme AC , the last one they released
works just fine in 2020
Still gets security updates when needed (2019), I use a separate 1tb drive for time machine
works just fine in 2020
Still gets security updates when needed (2019), I use a separate 1tb drive for time machine
I still use my 2tb Airport Time capsule, think I got it in 2013. It works fine as a router, so I'll probably stick with it until it dies. But I don't really use it with Time Machine anymore. It was always painfully slow for that (less than 50MB/sec on gigabit ethernet), tried plugging in an external disk once but that was ridiculously slow (about 25MB/sec), even with a fast disk.
I now use a 2012 quad Mini as a Time Machine server and get around 100MB/sec. But a bigger issue for me is that the disk in the Time Capsule is really noisy in a quiet room. It's in the room adjacent to my bedroom and disk access would really bother me in the middle of the night.
I now use a 2012 quad Mini as a Time Machine server and get around 100MB/sec. But a bigger issue for me is that the disk in the Time Capsule is really noisy in a quiet room. It's in the room adjacent to my bedroom and disk access would really bother me in the middle of the night.
You definitely mean MB not Mb there? I wouldn’t have thought 50MBps is too bad for backing up a file system over a network (it’s not a big single sequential benchmark transfer, TM slows things down somewhat anyway I find). I now have a similar set up to you thought but with a 2018 Mac Mini acting as a TM server for multiple wired and wireless Macs, plus other file and media services (some of this is on a USB3.1g2 RAID). Limit can be the gigabit networking now.
The Airport Extreme and Time Capsule is starting to get "long in the tooth", so to speak.
Questions about where you live:
More than one floor?
Do you get good wifi coverage everywhere?
You might consider one of the new "mesh systems" that have become plentiful.
These are great for getting good coverage all through the home, multiple floors, etc.
The best of these have 3 radio channels:
2.4ghz
5ghz
and... a 3rd channel that handles the internal "backhaul" traffic (so that this doesn't interfere with the first two channels).
A couple of 3-channel systems that come to mind:
- Linksys Velop
- Netgear Orbi
But... there are numerous others out there (that work pretty well with just 2 channels) such as eero, google wifi, etc.
You may not need this right away.
But as the Time Capsule is getting old, it might be time to start planning for an eventual replacement.
One other thing:
If it's just one Mac (or even two) that you're backing up, I'd suggest an external drive and a cloning app like CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper as being "more reliable in a moment of extreme need" than time machine...
Questions about where you live:
More than one floor?
Do you get good wifi coverage everywhere?
You might consider one of the new "mesh systems" that have become plentiful.
These are great for getting good coverage all through the home, multiple floors, etc.
The best of these have 3 radio channels:
2.4ghz
5ghz
and... a 3rd channel that handles the internal "backhaul" traffic (so that this doesn't interfere with the first two channels).
A couple of 3-channel systems that come to mind:
- Linksys Velop
- Netgear Orbi
But... there are numerous others out there (that work pretty well with just 2 channels) such as eero, google wifi, etc.
You may not need this right away.
But as the Time Capsule is getting old, it might be time to start planning for an eventual replacement.
One other thing:
If it's just one Mac (or even two) that you're backing up, I'd suggest an external drive and a cloning app like CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper as being "more reliable in a moment of extreme need" than time machine...
Megabytes per second. Here is the Time Capsule internal drive
And this is a fast external disk attached to the Time Capsule
You don't think 50 Mbit/set per second is bad performance for a gigabit ethernet LAN? It's terrible IMO.
I work with lots of big files and want Time Machine to get its job done and then go away. It would just take forever for backups to that Time Capsule. And it hasn't been as robust as I'd like. About three times over the years, I have gotten an alert saying that it failed an integrity check and all my old backups needed to be deleted.
Of course, the Time Capsule was never my only backup, I also have bootable clones on SSD's and direct-connected Time Machine disks.
I still use my 2TB Airport Extreme Time Capsule. I get 117MBps and have had no issues other than changing the CAT 5 cable to 5e. The cable change made a huge difference.
You are seeing 117 MBytes/sec? That is surprising, there have been some long threads about the Time Capsule and Airport Extreme in the past, and nobody was getting anywhere near that. That is basically saturating gigabit ethernet. I'm using my Time Capsule as a router and other devices connected to it are getting about 100MBytes/sec.
Just to be clear, this is the Time Capsule that I have:
support.apple.com
Just to be clear, this is the Time Capsule that I have:
AirPort Time Capsule 802.11ac - Technical Specifications - Apple Support
Nah I was saying 50 MB/sec is reasonable - but not the disk speed, I’m talking about the end-to-end performance throughput of what you actually see during a network backup from TM, just from looking at the elapsed time versus backup size. I tend to find it is very peaky bandwidth, as it goes through the many small files it needs to back up.
Mine still works great! I would say unless you notice some performance loss or the coverage isn’t good enough, it would be fine to keep a while longer.
I recently picked up a DD-WRT router during quarantine so I could have VPN turned at the router. It wasn’t as good as I thought it would be and the speeds on the devices was exactly the same so I went back to the AirPort Extreme.