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Will Apple abandon Time Capsule?
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No chance. But who cares? I use an Airport Extreme and you can plug in your own disk drive.
The current TC is 3T, and there is no way to recover 3T user data via internet for a normal home user. It's just far too slow.
IMO, iCloud and TC are 2 different market. Of course, Apple should provide time machine function (or easy backup solution) for iPhone / iPad on to the TC, but they didn't. And force the Mac user to use iCloud is too early. The average internet connection quality (and quantity) is not there yet.
For me, I am more than OK, I have 1000Mbps internet connection with unlimited data. But quite a lot of Mac users are with much slower internet speed with data cap. If Apple give up TC now, they will simply force the user to buy external HDD, Network disk, etc as their own backup solution.
Also, not everyone love to upload their own data on to the net (even that's Apple server). For professional, they may not even allow to upload anything to the net for backup purpose. Many user still prefer / must have onsite backup solution, and keep all their data 100% private.
IMO, iCloud and TC are 2 different market. Of course, Apple should provide time machine function (or easy backup solution) for iPhone / iPad on to the TC, but they didn't. And force the Mac user to use iCloud is too early. The average internet connection quality (and quantity) is not there yet.
For me, I am more than OK, I have 1000Mbps internet connection with unlimited data. But quite a lot of Mac users are with much slower internet speed with data cap. If Apple give up TC now, they will simply force the user to buy external HDD, Network disk, etc as their own backup solution.
Also, not everyone love to upload their own data on to the net (even that's Apple server). For professional, they may not even allow to upload anything to the net for backup purpose. Many user still prefer / must have onsite backup solution, and keep all their data 100% private.
Which is exactly the point I want to make. TC doesn't prevent silent file corruption, or disk failures, and not iPhone / iPad backup either. And yet Apple doesn't seems to want to give us a new TC with these new features either.
That is why I got to the point of thinking they are forcing user to iCloud.
My guess would be. TC is for Mac, for this purpose, It's OK at the moment.
1) Silent file corruption is almost unavoidable.
2) Disk failure cannot be avoided, but lost data can be solved by have 2 TC or more (yes, they want you to buy more). In fact, that works quite well, the OS will automatically swap between TCs on each backup.
3) iPhone's backup is made via iTunes, so, eventually it's backup to TC indirectly.
The current TC has Wi-fi ac, 3T HDD. Except cMP user, no Mac need more than 3T backup space (according to Apple's logic). And the Mac Pro user should have their own expensive backup solution anyway, Apple never care about this market.
So, for me, even though I love to see that Apple at least give a silent update to TC (e.g. 4T or even larger HDD), but it seems this will not happen until the iMac has 4T HDD option officially.
TBH, I was a dual TC user. And now, I simply use 1 3T TC to backup the important files, which able to keep different versions for easy recovery. And then just clone my data to another external HDDs every night to have the system snapshot. IMO, TC is only good for recover files, not good to recover system, and the worst is TC that is not bootable. And now, I have my cloned HDD every night, if anything goes wrong on my primary SSD, I can simply boot from the backup HDD and at least have a functioning computer to work with.
I'd try to recover about 2T of data from TC (whole system recovery), it cost more than a day, really crazy slow. For a system that has only 128G SSD, TC may be a very good solution. But when the file size getting larger and larger, TC is far too slow for the job (regardless the network speed, in my own test, TC can only read / write at around 30MB/s max).
1) Silent file corruption is almost unavoidable.
2) Disk failure cannot be avoided, but lost data can be solved by have 2 TC or more (yes, they want you to buy more). In fact, that works quite well, the OS will automatically swap between TCs on each backup.
3) iPhone's backup is made via iTunes, so, eventually it's backup to TC indirectly.
The current TC has Wi-fi ac, 3T HDD. Except cMP user, no Mac need more than 3T backup space (according to Apple's logic). And the Mac Pro user should have their own expensive backup solution anyway, Apple never care about this market.
So, for me, even though I love to see that Apple at least give a silent update to TC (e.g. 4T or even larger HDD), but it seems this will not happen until the iMac has 4T HDD option officially.
TBH, I was a dual TC user. And now, I simply use 1 3T TC to backup the important files, which able to keep different versions for easy recovery. And then just clone my data to another external HDDs every night to have the system snapshot. IMO, TC is only good for recover files, not good to recover system, and the worst is TC that is not bootable. And now, I have my cloned HDD every night, if anything goes wrong on my primary SSD, I can simply boot from the backup HDD and at least have a functioning computer to work with.
I'd try to recover about 2T of data from TC (whole system recovery), it cost more than a day, really crazy slow. For a system that has only 128G SSD, TC may be a very good solution. But when the file size getting larger and larger, TC is far too slow for the job (regardless the network speed, in my own test, TC can only read / write at around 30MB/s max).
Exactly. And maybe the next generation will do USB-C ports.
That won't work without a work around. Networked Time Machine backups like that are kept inside a sparse bundle image and will not be viewable to restore when connected directly to a mac over USB. There is a way you can open the sparse bundle image and drag the backups.backupdb actual backup file out of the sparse bundle to the root of the external drive. Then you can access it over USB to restore.
Time Capsule, with a single drive, is pretty risky as a backup device, when you consider what a simple Raid 1 mirror system costs. The real gem in the system is Time Machine, Capsule not so much.
I own Time Capsule but I think its time has come and gone. For one thing, you can easily attach USB hard disk to AirPort Extreme and if you have a good Internet connection, a cloud-based backup such as Backblaze is just so much more reliable (only $50/year for unlimited storage, including external disks).
The least Apple could've done is add caching server and iTunes server into Time Capsule.
Anyway, both AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule are way overdue for update.
The least Apple could've done is add caching server and iTunes server into Time Capsule.
Anyway, both AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule are way overdue for update.
The caching server is something I have said earlier in another thread. The OSX server was suppose to have this feature, but it is undocumented and don't know if it still works.
The cloud is all good if, and only if everyone has an Internet connection everywhere, very fast and without data cap. I don't see that happening even in 2020.
The cloud is all good if, and only if everyone has an Internet connection everywhere, very fast and without data cap. I don't see that happening even in 2020.