Apple Time Capsule alternative?

[ben824]

Hey y'all, so with Apple discontinuing the Apple Time Capsule, that kinda puts a damper on my plans to upgrade from my 2nd generation that is starting to show its age. What is a good an affordable Home wifi router that offers back-up storage? I need to get my wifi speeds up more. I increased the internet speeds from my provider but there still seems to be some delays and I find myself having to switch wifi off on my iPhone and iPad regularly and use cell signal because the wifi just seems to freeze entirely.

I thought I read something that if the router of choice has a USB port then you can take any external hard drive and plug it in via USB and my Mac will recognize it in the time machine setup menu to back up to. Has anyone tried this?

 

[chabig]

My recommendation...keep your backup system separate from your wifi router. Mine is a Mac Mini running High Sierra on my home network and acting as a Time Machine server for all (both) of my other Macs.

 

[ben824]

My recommendation...keep your backup system separate from your wifi router. Mine is a Mac Mini running High Sierra on my home network and acting as a Time Machine server for all (both) of my other Macs.

Unfortunately my pockets are not that deep haha The Time Capsule has been great for us, never really been a problem. My parents have had one for years and I picked up this 2nd Get used on craigslist with a bad hard drive. I swapped in a 1TB drive to replace the bad 500GB drive and it has worked pretty well for a couple of years but now I feel it is not quite up to carrying the load and demand of our connected lifestyle. We stream a lot of TV content between Netflix and Direct TV Now so I think with this device being 9 years old, it may be time to retire it and move on to something that can handle the load of todays household needs. Like I said in the first post, I read on a few different sites that routers with a USB-3 port can have a external hard drive connected at all times and the Time Machine app on the Mac will recognize it on the network and back up to it the same as the current Time Capsule that I have.

 

[chabig]

I got my Mini for $300 on Craigslist.

Here’s a thread that might help https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...xternal-drive-as-time-machine-backup.1605542/

 

[Fishrrman]

OP:

Take the hard drive OUT OF the Time Capsule.
Put it into a USB3/SATA docking station.

Connect it directly to the Mac.

Use either CarbonCopyCloner, SuperDuper or Time Machine to back up.
I prefer a cloning solution such as CCC or SD.