Backup time machine airport extreme. How to Backup Your iPhone with TimeCapsule

And also about how I replaced my old TP-Link with a Time Capsule.

The smart must learn from the mistakes of fools. Therefore, I share unusual experiences and interesting thoughts.

In short, the information on the MacBook has become too expensive, and I don't want to completely accidentally lose it. Buying a Time Capsule to automate the process Reserve copy. And not only.

Accidentally deleted advertising script that could backfire on me

The management still approved the final version. Called a film crew and a team of amateur actors to a specific location at a designated time.

I'll skip the nuances. But an hour before filming began, I realized that there is no script file. I have no idea where he went. I think I accidentally rubbed it along with the sketches for materials for website which did not go to press. But not a fact.

I quickly rewrote it from memory close to the text. With grief, he got out in half, and no one noticed anything. But everything could have turned out differently - I would have paid for a useless shooting day out of my own pocket, ruined my relationship with the management and would have been stuck with it all for another couple of weeks.

And there are many such stories for everyone. Therefore, I decided to understand Time Machine and start regular backup.

By the way, here the test version of the new arrived in time. And it makes no sense to understand it without backup copies of important data.

Toshiba external hard drive as a "crutch" for Time Machine

By and large, so far I have singled out for myself only four use cases- backup, router, external storage and private cloud. Here, probably, the minimum amount of memory will suffice.

But if with buying an iPhone 7 Plus (while I'm aiming for a bigger smartphone) in September I will start shooting videos in 4K from trips, it's better to look at the option with a larger volume. Yes, and another Mac in the family is planned, so in this case there is no reason to save. But this is purely my opinion.

Good day! In the same breath, I continue the manuals for working devices with Apple devices. Now I want to talk about connecting to the Time Capsule drive with mobile devices. As you understand, we will talk about iOS devices and Android devices. I must say right away that it’s easier to work with Time Capsule on Android and there are more synchronization functions, which is very strange, like Apple, but it doesn’t work properly, and then only with the iPad (many thanks to those who found a way to connect to the iPhone). So, let's begin.

1. A bit of theory and what we need.

Let's start with theory, or why is it so easy to connect? It's very simple: Time Capsule works using the SMB protocol, which is supported by some programs. Having finished with the theory, let's move on to the list of programs:
For iPad: Oplayer HD(
3. Press +, then "Windows Server (Samba)" and see the window:

where:
Host - IP address of the Time Capsule on the network (10.0.1.1 or 192.168.1.1 - it all depends on the settings, the default is 10.0.1.1)
Port - do not touch
Login - username of the Time Capsule drive
Password - Time Capsule user password
Name - any name of the server (Kolya, Lesha, Time Capsule Home, etc.)
4. Click "Save" and voila, the server has been added:

Now you can watch movies directly from your Time Capsule
BUGS: when paused, the sound/picture is out of sync.

"Getting Android friends with Time Capsule"

Here you will have to tinker a little, but the result is worth it: movies, music and files - all this can be downloaded directly to the device! So, let's begin:
1. Open ES Explorer(RUS ES Explorer):

2. Make a swipe left or right, press "Network" (upper left corner):

3. Choose LAN:

4. Click "Create"
5. Select "Server":

6. A window will open:

where:
Domain - do not touch;
Address - IP address of the Time Capsule on the network (10.0.1.1 or 192.168.1.1 - it all depends on the settings, the default is 10.0.1.1);
Login - username of the Time Capsule drive;
Password - Time Capsule user password;
Name - any name of the server (Kolya, Lesha, Time Capsule Home, etc.).
7. Voila, the server appeared in the program.
8. You ask why we installed Rock-Player, I will answer: to watch the video from the capsule! The video goes quite comfortably, the player supports many file formats, in general - I recommend it! The same program can play video from the device.

Yesterday, in the discussion, several questions arose about how to make the Time Capsule, this useful gadget from Apple has become even more useful. Time Capsule, let me remind you, is a combined device that contains wifi router and HDD, available over the network for Macs. Accordingly, the device has two main purposes - to store backups created by Time Machine and distribute a WiFi signal for computers and other devices.
With WiFi is easier in total - Time Capsule can receive Internet from a provider (with Ethernet or PPPoE, raising a VPN connection, like Beeline's, is not supported), and distribute it according to various 802.11abgn standards. Moreover, the modern version of the Time Capsule (like the Airport Extreme) has two antennas built in at once, to support the old (slow) and new (fast) standards. This is convenient if there are devices at home that do not support new standards, then because of them you do not need to “lower” the type of connection for all other devices. It so happened to me that there are generally three WiFi networks at home, one is distributed by NetGear (there is g), and two - 802.11n and 802.11n 5GHz - Airport Extreme. Very convenient 🙂 With the backup part a little more interesting.

If you plan to use the Time Capsule exclusively for storing unencrypted Time Machine backups or as a simple file dump, then no other gestures are needed, the device will serve just fine in the form in which it is available out of the box. I pursued two goals when planning the use of the Time Capsule.
1. Safety
You can never be too careful, especially in our world, where there are enough all kinds of assholes. Therefore, I also encrypt the disk on my computer with using FileVault, and other data, if possible, I try to protect, so backups should also be protected. By default, even though the data is copied from the encrypted disk, it is already unprotected on the Time Capsule, and this bothered me. By the way, if you make a Time Machine backup to a locally connected via USB / Firewire / Thunderbolt, then on OS X 10.7 you can also encrypt it using FileVault, and not worry about your data.
2. Storage of other data
When a computer has only 256GB of disk space, you start to be very careful about what is stored on your computer. In this regard, 70GB of not the largest music collection looks like a kind of burden that significantly interferes with the economical mode of data storage on a computer. There will always be some other content - photos, videos - that takes up a lot of space, and at the same time I want it to be quickly available. Leaving it on the Time Capsule disk where Time Machine is backing up is somehow dumb, because there is always a risk of losing this data.
Based on these two considerations, I wanted to find a solution that would allow the use of the Time Capsule, and at the same time satisfy everyone necessary conditions for data storage. And such a solution was found, albeit non-trivial, but it works. I didn’t come up with it, the link above is the original, and on the blog there is a simplified version in a language that many people understand.
1. Find out the name of the computer. This can be done in System Preferences, in the Sharing section:


My Macbook Air called Beauty because it's very pretty, yes 🙂 It's important that the computer name does NOT contain spaces.
2. Find out the MAC address of your network card. The instructions said that you need the MAC address of the main Ethernet card, but since the MacBook Air does not have Ethernet, you need a MAC address WiFi adapter. What to do in the case of, say, iMac, where Ethernet is still present, I do not know, but I would still start with the MAC address of the Ethernet adapter. You can find the MAC address by going to the same System Preferences, the Network section, then in the column on the left, select WiFi, click the Advanced button ...


... after which a window opens for you, where the MAC address of your WiFi card will be written below:


Write it down for yourself, you will need it later.
3. Next, we assume that the disk from the Time Capsule is mounted on your Mac, because we will need to create an empty encrypted disk image and save it to the disk with the Time Capsule. To do this, you need to open the Disk Utility application, and select the command to create a new disk image. You will see the following dialog by default:


4. Next, you will need to take the following steps:
a) enter a name for the name of this disk image, which must contain the ComputerName_MAC address. (MAC address is specified without colons).
b) in the Name field enter the name of the computer
c) Specify the size of the disk image. Depends on the disk space of your computer and the disk space of the Time Capsule. For a typical home user, 300-500GB is enough
d) Disk image format - Mac OS X Extended (Journaled)
e) Encryption - 128bit AES. It is quite secure and still provides acceptable performance.
f) Partition - do not change, leave Single Partition, Apple Partition Map
g) Image Format - specify “sparse bundle disk image”.


The sparse bundle disk image format means that this disk image will not initially take up much space, but will grow as it fills up until it reaches the maximum value you specify. After that, Time Machine will understand that “the disk is full”, and will offer you to delete the oldest backups according to its own algorithm. Optionally, using command line, the size of the disk image can be increased.
When you save this disk image, Disk Utility will ask you to provide a password for it - this is usually required when you mount the disk image. Save the password in Keychain. Don't forget to save this disk image to a disk from the Time Capsule!
5. Open the Keychain Access application - this is the application that stores your passwords. You will need to find in the list of passwords the one you specified to mount the disk image. It's in your user keychain, which is most likely called login (mine is called login_renamed_1, historically, never mind). The important thing is that you need to transfer this object from your user login in a bunch of keys system- just grab and drag this object to system and release the mouse button.


6. Now the nonsense remains - to specify in the Time Machine settings the disk from the Time Capsule as a disk for saving Time Machine backups.


Please note that it is the disk from the Time Capsule that appears as the backup disk in the settings. However, street magic comes into play - the system itself mounts the disk image, uploads a backup to it (for the first time, the process takes a lot of time, although everything, of course, depends on how much data you have on your computer), and upon completion it unmounts the disk . In this case, the data is stored on an encrypted disk image, so even if someone receives physical access to the hard drive from the Time Capsule, it will have to work very hard to see your files. At the same time, you get a guarantee that Time Machine, while backing up, will not get carried away and will not demolish your data, remaining within the space allocated to it on the disk image.
There is one more additional advice which I also used. By default, Time Machine backs up data every hour. This, of course, is useful, but I do not need such a frequency of saving backups. Therefore, you can use the TimeMachineEditor utility, which allows you to set the interval for creating Time Machine backups the way you like it. For me personally, it is enough to do this once a day. I hope these tips help you too.

Time Machine is macOS' built-in backup feature. It automatically backs up the contents of your computer to external drive or network storage.

Time Machine is a file backup feature found in every modern macOS versions. By enabling Time Machine, you will protect yourself from accidental deletion or loss of files. Any files and folders, as well as their intermediate versions, can be restored.

Now I will tell you how to set up and use Time Machine.

How Time Machine Works

Time Machine backs up the user's folders: documents, downloads, applications, etc.

Backups are created automatically, every hour. All you have to do is specify the disk to which the system will backup.

After setting up Time Machine, you will always have access to:

• hourly backups for the last 24 hours;
• daily backups for the last month;
• weekly backups for all other months of work.

Time Machine does not back up itself. macOS systems. Therefore, if your system has completely flown, you will first have to put macOS on a clean one. recovery mode, and then restore information from Time Machine using the Migration Assistant.

How to set up Time Machine

To enable Time Machine - Connect to Mac external hard drive and select it in:

 ▸ System Preferences… ▸ Time Machine ▸ Select Disk…

The system will ask you to format the disk specifically for Time Machine, so make sure that there is no important information on it.

Be sure to enable backup encryption so that no one else can access your files.

Which disc is better to choose

As for connecting the disk, there are two options: wired and wireless. Both have their advantages and disadvantages.

Wired Disk

The easiest and most affordable option. Mechanical HDD for 1 TB will cost $60-70. It is not as fast as an SSD, but the speed of a modern disk is more than enough to transfer several hundred megabytes to it once an hour.

🐢Western Digital My Passport USB-A 1TB: Rozetka/Citilink

The downside is that a wired connection is not convenient and not very reliable. If you can connect a disk to an iMac and forget about it, then you will have to constantly connect / disconnect the disk to a laptop. It's just too lazy to do it.

Over time, USB connectors, and especially USB-C, begin to become loose and the drive may “fall off” at the time of backup, which leads to file corruption in the case of mechanical drives.

Wireless Drive

With such a disk, a backup occurs when the computer is in the coverage area home WiFi. With wireless connection accidental disconnection of the drive due to a dropped power wire is excluded, as is the case with wired drives, which means there is less chance of damaging some files when copying.

As a rule, the drive is connected to your access point via an Ethernet cable, after which it appears in macOS as a separate network drive.

A network drive can be used to back up several home computers at once.

Time Capsule

Surely you have heard about the Time Capsule from Apple itself. This is an access point with a built-in network drive for several terabytes, which is tailored to work with Time Machine. Alas, Apple in 2018 curtailed the division responsible for the Time Capsule and AirPort access points, so it's better to take a closer look at the two previous options.

What disk size to choose

It is better to take a disk that is two or more times larger than your main one. For example, if in Macbook Pro costs a 512 GB SSD, then under backup Time Machine is better off allocating a 1 TB drive. In this case, you will have a history of file changes for at least the last couple of months, not weeks.

What happens when the disk is full

Time Machine will automatically start deleting the oldest weekly backups that are older than one month. So the work of Time Machine will never stop.

How to limit the size of a Time Machine copy

Time Machine "captures" the entire disk that you specify for its needs. If your external drive is 4 terabytes, then TM will keep older backups until the drive is full.

The only way to “pacify” Time Machine is to create a separate smaller logical partition for it and make backups for it. You can do this through disk utility macOS.

If you have a large disk, it makes sense to create a separate smaller partition for Time Machine. To do this, the disk will have to be formatted and partitioned.

How to exclude folders from backup

Sometimes it is useful to exclude certain directories from backups, for example the folder Downloads or Films, in which files appear and delete frequently.

To exclude the desired folder, go to  ▸ System settings▸ Time Machine ▸ Settings and add it to the list by pressing the + key.

How to recover files from Tim Machine

If you need to restore a file, launch Time Machine from the folder Applications:

Finder ▸ Applications ▸ Time Machine

You will see a Finder window in the form of a carousel. Let's say you need to recover a file from your desktop that was there last week. Go to your desktop in a Finder window and then use the on-screen arrows ⬆︎ ⬇︎ to move between backups until you see this file.

Click on the file and click Restore.

If Time Machine was not enabled and you need to restore the files, then .

How to disable internal backups

If you set up Time Machine, but stopped connecting the backup drive, then after a couple of weeks you will notice a lack of free space on the main drive.

This is because while the external drive is not connected, Time Machine creates temporary backups on the system drive.

To clean up local backups, simply mount the drive that you set up to work with Time Machine. The system itself will transfer all local backups to this drive.

If you are unable to connect the drive to your computer, then delete the /.MobileBackups folder, which stores local backups.

If you want to completely disable local backups, then run in Terminal command:

sudo tmutil disablelocal

Enable local backups back:

sudo tmutil enablelocal

If you disable local backups, then Time Machine will only work when an external drive is connected to the computer.

🌿 Remember

1. To turn on Time Machine, you will definitely need an external drive. With system drive or "cloud" this function does not work;
2. I recommend buying an SSD. These discs are more reliable and faster than mechanical discs. And they are not afraid of falling;
3. Be sure to enable disk encryption so that no one can access your files in the backup;
4. Backup occurs automatically and every hour if the computer is connected to a power source;
5. It is desirable that the disk size be twice as large as the disk of your MacBook or iMac. This way you can have backup copies of files from the last few months.

I must say right away that Planet, in my opinion, is the easiest provider to set up, but it has 1 pitfall that can unbalance a little if you don’t know about it (details below)! I did the setup with a friend, where I was able to take a bunch of screenshots, and get a great photo from ! So, let's get started (there are a lot of pictures under the cut)!

AirPort Time Capsule

The first thing to do is turn on the access point to the network, connect the cable from the provider to the WAN connector and run the AirPort Utility (Programs / Utilities). If the access point has already been configured for the previous provider, then it is better to reset by pressing and holding for 10 seconds on special button on the back of the AirPort and set it up from scratch. Please note that the data on the disk (in the case of the Time Capsule) is not deleted, only the network and WiFi settings are reset!

After all the conditions from the previous paragraph have been met, we proceed to the configuration. First we must select our access point from the list of available networks.

Right after that, AirPort Utility may open, with presetting capsule. If this does not happen, feel free to run it!

The access point will be prepared for configuration, and if you have already configured other AirPorts from your computer, the system will automatically go through them to check the settings.

After going through all the previous options, the Utility will give you the fields to enter the basic settings.

I’ll make a reservation right away that I chose the Other options item, as this will give a little more customization options. As a result, we see such a window:

In this case, it was necessary to set up the Time Capsule as new, and I chose the first option. I think you will need the same. Feel free to click Next!

Here we prescribe the main parameters of the future network. The network name is how the network will be seen by your devices, the base station name is the identifier of the access point itself (it will later be displayed in the Finder sidebar when accessing the disk), the password is the password you will use to connect to AirPort. The first and second names can be made the same. By the way, to access the network and its settings, you can make different passwords. You will need this if you want to protect your network from unauthorized reconfiguration, for example, in an office or public place (cafe). After filling in all the fields, we boldly move forward.

In a new window, you can activate guest network. You need it, for example, if you want to distribute the Internet and be on the same network with someone, but you don’t want someone to have access to the built-in disk (or to the one connected to USB in the case of Airport Time Capsule and Extreme ). If you skip this step and do not set up a guest network, you can enable it later from the advanced settings of AirPort Utility. Move on.

At this stage, the settings are applied and the access point is rebooted. After everything that we did with the access point, it should take it all into itself.

After the reboot, we see a globe icon representing the Internet and our AirPort Time Capsule. If you click on it, we will see a small menu where you can enter the fine-tuning of the access point. To do this, click on Edit.

The first tab allows you to configure the Base Station.

Here we see fields that are already familiar to us, in which we will not change anything unless there is an urgent need. It can also be configured for help from Apple ID, if you click on the plus and enter your ID and password. Let's go to the Internet tab.

In this window, you will need to enter your Internet details that the provider provided you. I remembered several providers that AirPort works with - Planet, ... There may be others, but I won’t say that right off the bat. Why these providers? Yes, simply because they do not use tunneling (VPN), which is not supported by apple access points. Kabinet, Dom.ru, MTS, Beeline, Akado use VPN, and to set up AirPort Express / Extreme, you first need a VPN router that will connect to the provider, and only then distribute "clean" (via DHCP or static) apple Internet access point.

As for the pitfall of the Planet (Convex and Ruskom) - they have a MAC address binding, and if you change the router, then you will need to call the service technical support and ask to rebind the point (passport data may be needed). After a successful conversation with the TP, you will be able to access the Internet.

By the way, if the provider automatically issues the details, then leave Connect via, in the DHCP state. If some other parameters are used (static IP or PPPoE), then select it:

After choosing the type of connection and entering the details, you can go to next tab.

At this stage, you can slightly change the operation of the access point itself, if it is an extension of an existing wireless network. In this case, select Extended in the Network Mode menu. wireless network. A similar case may occur in a large house or office, where the range of one point may not be enough.

Also here you can change the way the network is encrypted WPA, WPA 2 and others. By the way, if you didn’t create a guest network at the AirPort initial setup stage, then this can be done right here.

If you click on the Parameters ... button, then another interesting field will open in front of us:

In this window, you can activate the 5GHz network, as well as select a channel for the wireless network. Now we will not dwell on this in detail, you can try to experiment on your own and decide which mode of operation suits you best. If there are no questions here, click Save and go to the next tab - Network:

I would be happy to tell you in detail about all the points, only here you will not need them in most cases. And if you need it, you can always 🙂

Let's go to last tab— Disk.

In the case of setting up Tima Capsule, you will see the built-in disk, its volume and free space on it. Here you can clean the disk, or transfer all data to an external disk by clicking on the Backup Disk button. We will not touch other settings - everything works as it should!

If you have gone through all the steps and selected the settings that suit you, then feel free to click on Update and agree to the update. After restarting AirPort, you can reconnect to it and enjoy the Internet!

Let me remind you again that AirPort Express, Extreme and Time Capsule do not support VPN! I strongly recommend that you take this fact into account when choosing an access point to your home, or when choosing a provider! If you still find yourself in a situation with a VPN, do not despair - a simple "gasket" between the provider and your AirPort can be TP-Link TL-WR841, for example. Personally, I have a similar router that takes out all communication in the apartment 🙂

Remote access to Time Capsule and back up iPhone to Time Capsule

Dear readers, as an afterword, I would like to clarify something else. I often receive emails like the following:

• the ability to remotely access the Time Capsule from the Internet (without using a permanent ip-address);
• interaction with Time Capsule and iPhone/iPad disk. How to back up your phone to a capsule.

AirPort Express/Extreme/Time Capsule - home, amateur devices! They are very easy to configure, as you saw above, but their functionality is very poor! They cannot be loaded with Padavan firmware, dd-wrt or something similar, thereby expanding the potential of AirPort ... These access points are more suitable for a home or small office, but not for geeks who want to get the most out of the device ...

Remote access to the Time Capsule is carried out only through your Apple ID. In the first tab Base station"You can enter your Apple ID below and then your capsule will be seen on your Mac from anywhere in the world, as long as there is an Internet connection. No, this will not work with Windows. And it doesn't matter what kind of network connection you have: DHCP, static or PPPoE.

How to watch Time Capsule movies from iPhone/iPad? Nothing, no crutches... This hotspot only works well with computers. Yes, you can install a program like or on your iPhone/iPad and connect a disk from Capsule to it. To be honest: I tried these solutions and everything works extremely well. user friendly. In short, one place...

How to create a backup iPhone copies/iPad on Time Capsule? Almost nothing. That is, directly, so that at the click of a button a copy was created, or even automatically - no way! There is a workaround, but there is no way without a computer: the most ordinary backup copy is created in iTunes, and then the ~/Library/Application Support/Mobile sync/Backups folder is either manually transferred to the capsule or we wait for the next update of the copy via Time Machine, so that the local copy from iTunes got on the capsule. And then we go to the iTunes settings and delete the backup so that it does not take up space on the built-in disk ... I say that this was done through one place ...

By the way, at the expense of the photo, which I wrote about at the very beginning, here it is:

Many thanks to Nikita Polosov for such a cool shot and for providing access to my AirPort Time Capsule!