Time has run out on Time Capsules
eclecticlight.co
eclecticlight.co
I'm increasingly disillusioned with this world of hardware costing hundreds of dollars being considered geriatric at 3 years old. Requiring constant replacements mean that you don't really own anything, you're renting your whole life. And since new hardware only supports new software, it keeps you stuck on the software treadmill too.
The article isn't wrong, it's a real problem of cheap mechanical drives. But it's not okay.
HDDs have always been considered a wearable part. SSDs are better but their lifespan also has a limit.
It's actually a selling point for things like OneDrive, operating your own file share has costs too, might as well shift these capex to opex.
> And since new hardware only supports new software, it keeps you stuck on the software treadmill too.
Part of the reasons is supporting older hardware requires back-porting changes. Or having N different versions of the same product in flight at all times.
There's a good reason some businesses are moving toward SaaS.
Yes they are mechanical and will eventually fail but three years for an HDD is not a good trend.
The good ol' days. I haven't lost a spindle since I started using UPS to prevent voltage sags. Power outages make drive heads retract very fast, but a series of brown outs or 70VAC being put down the line used to cause me so much grief.
So... like most things in life? Off the top of my head:
* house: you're either renting it or paying property tax/maintenance on it
* car: maintenance
* food: you can only eat it once!
* smartphones: battery wears out
Digital informatioin storage has represented a compromise between speed and flexibility of access against durability of media. It stands in marked contrast with numerous other examples. Commercial CDs last decades --- I have several which are among the first produced in the mid-1980s, which still play perfectly. Vinyl and shellac records go back 60--100+ years. I've numerous decades-old books and at least one volume within easy reach dating to 1897, I suspect there are older in the house. With suitable preservation, paper books last centuries and there are extant copies of the first moveable-type texts ever printed, over 500 years old. Papyrus and clay tablets date back millennia.
We can do better than three years. A suitable durable digital archival format is badly needed.
> Vinyl and shellac records go back 60--100+ years
>decades-old books and at least one volume within easy reach dating to 1897
These aren't comparable to hard drives because they're all mass produced copies of a master. Hard drives can be arbitrarily written with whatever data you desire.
>We can do better than three years
tapes? optical discs? they last longer than hard drives, but have other trade-offs.
On durable digital media, you'd need something that's writable at least once, and then remarkably inert. There've been some proposals for data cubes or crystals which look as if they might fit that bill, such as Microsoft's Project Silica:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-sil...
Whether that's intended to be (or can be adapted) for home / small office use isn't clear.
Magneto-optical storage seems to be pretty robust, but after a brief heyday in the late 1990s, has disappeared off my radar. I'm not finding any current product offerings, and Wikipedia seems to confirm this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive
Tape has supported longer duration storage, but still is mostly limited to a few decades. Delamination and demagnitisation are both problems.
Paper in the form of punched cards, punched tape, or print-encoded paper digital storage (I've run across a reference to this) are actually ... among the more durable if less dense options out there. They're far from ideal, but might back at least some forms of storage.
Some CDROM formats claim 10,000 year potential, though you need to know what you're looking for:
Write-once BD-R HTL (High To Low) can last for 100 to 150 years given a relatively mild environment—i.e., not on your dashboard in Phoenix. Milleniatta’s M-Disc BD-R and DVD+R write-once discs use an even more stable data layer that is rated for 10,000 years.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2984597/hard-core-data-prese...
Most of the interesting work here is probably with libraries and archivalists. The US Library of Congress has some pages on CD-R / DVD-4 longevity:
https://www.loc.gov/preservation/scientists/projects/cd-r_dv...
There's a UNESCO project:
https://www.unesco.org/archives/multimedia/subject/14/Digita...
But I'm coming up thin on solid suggestions or research.
>But I'm coming up thin on solid suggestions or research.
Tape/optical discs don't fit the bill? You mentioned that discs only last long in mild conditions, but is this a dealbreaker? Who's storing their archives on a "dashboard in Phoenix"? As for tapes only lasting a few decades, who cares? That nice part about digital media is that they can be duplicated with no loss of quality. Making copies as you go seems like the best way to go here, rather than trying to engineer a medium that can last centuries.
Best case, some TINY, TINY fraction of Papyrus survived, and most of it is illegible at best.
And most of that only survived because of careful recopying by the priest / cleric hood.
Tl;dr materials degrade as soon as you manufacture something with them. Your only hope long term is careful backups to fresh media.
Printed books (given acid-free paper, parchment, or velum) have lifespans of centuries.
Papyrus has a similar lifespan, for original works, not copies. (Copying is an obvious data preservation mechanism, though it has its risks, notably transcription errors, omissions, and editorialising.)
Clay tablets, not subject to physical shock, persist for millennia. Much of archaeology is effectively clay-shard-ology.
Spinning-rust or SSD disk drive life is measured in single-digit years.
That's 2-4 orders of magnitude difference, of the medium itself, which is absolutely not irrelevant or trivial.
That model was released in 2013. The very last one ever made is more than three years old, but the rest are on average much older.
Seriously, though, we need to rethink the expected lifetime of products we buy. I live in a relatively new house for my neighborhood, it was built in 1972. I drive a 2008 Toyota. My desk has a sticker under it from 1993. The lamp over my head has a new-ish LED bulb in it, but the casting and glass are from the 1950s. My computer is a workstation from 2012, with a couple larger sticks of RAM and a pair of large SSDs it's as good as or better than most new machines. My phone is 2 years old now with no signs of wear, previously I had an LG G5 with a trivially swappable battery but the connectors and clips that held the modular design together wore out and LG stopped selling the OEM batteries.
Some of this disposable product culture results from obsolescence, tech is getting better and while my old Crestoloy wrench is just as good as new tool steel a router or hard drive from a decade ago is not as good as a new one, that's reasonable. What's unreasonable is that a three-year warranty, or mechanical designs that wear out in slightly more than that, is considered acceptable. And why, when the product does wear out, is it glued and clipped together in ways that make it unrepairable?
> with a pair of large SSDs
Great! So replace the drive in your time capsule with an SSD exactly like the article proposes too! Holy moly.
Most of these devices are literally the pinnacle of what we can reliably crank out in number.
If someone made an immortal hard drive, they’d be FUCKING RICH, because every elevator control system that gets forgotten about in a wall somewhere and industrial process control system would pay whatever it cost to just handle that.
Sooo... how does that support your argument?
Just yesterday, I followed this tutorial to replace the built in hard drive with a 1TB SSD instead:
Now my Mac is able to back up to it again. Only problem I see is a warning on the Airport Utility which says "This device may be overheating" but I am not sure why. It seems to be running okay.
Fair. But the drives in time capsules are not cheap (not the most expensive either, but certainly not cheap).
I still have one AirPort Extreme set in Bridge Mode, and hardwired to the main router so that my Time Machine backups still work with the USB drive hooked to it.
For those with a little techie know-how, I think the best solution is to rsync their home directory to a ZFS volume on a TrueNAS box and take periodic snapshots of that. Optionally replicate that volume somewhere else with different geology. Obviously not as convenient as Time Machine, but undoubtedly more robust and less likely to corrupt itself.
I guess the question is how long of a time can there be between when some of the backup is not actually recoverable and when you find out that fact. Murphy's Law aside, I need to recover data from backup so infrequently – if the system regularly verifies the backup, I should be able to just wait for the drive to start failing, right?
You can do some fun things while keeping stock UI, like blocking ads network-wide.
If you throw in startech ide to sata adapters, theres just enough room to shove a 2.5" sata drive into the 3.5" sled along with the adapter.
Time Machine backups, even to a working hard disk, are notoriously unreliable.
https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/hacks/src/branch/master/osxbackup/...
8 years later a 4TB HDD still cost about $100. And reliability has dropped.
A lot of my friends simply have a USB Portable HDD as Backup ( more like storage ). Their idea is that it is safer on a HDD than it is on their Phone which constantly run out of space. I keep telling my friends, to have multiple copies. I cant explain bit rot, HDD failure, crappy USB power supply, or all other major fuckery that could happen. And not everyone "likes" the cloud. And not everyone are comfortable with "subscriptions". And no one wants to understand why they need to pay more for a BTRFS NAS that offer some form of Bit-rot Protection and redundancy.
And whenever these thing are discussed you have another camp, the nerds, who keep telling normal user about rsync or 3-2-1 backup strategy.
There is a need for a simple easy to use system. Apple could have had a Time Capsule for iOS and could offer iCloud Backup Restore as extra option for additional piece of mind. But of course, that doesn't sit well with their services strategy.
My only actual concern is whether or not the networking aspect of my time capsule is up to snuff... Perhaps it makes sense to get a better wireless router, and perhaps there have been advances in router tech that mean I could get way better performance on my network. But there's no easy way for me to know if that's actually the case, so I'm just holding on to my time capsule until some event triggers me to make a change.
First they come out with Time Machine backups in late 2007, which is the most amazing file backup system ever made in terms of UI/X, come out with a tailored hardware platform for capturing those backups across all of your macs on a network, and then...not a goddamn thing except for breaking backups periodically. No reliability improvements. No compatibility improvements. Time Machine is still fucking weird and finicky and unreliable and randomly breaks after system updates, and it's still built into the OS, and Apple hasn't released a new first party product for using it with in ages, and it's still the most beautiful backup system ever made sitting there just taunting you.
So people are left to set up their own NAS which fails 9 times out of 10, making the entire setup process annoying as hell: "Try this configuration tweak." "Nope, still doesn't work." "Does it say why?" "No." "Ok, try this one."
I completely agree that a local NAS is different from and superior to an iCloud backup, but it's been replaced in their ecosystem.
iCloud storage is currently just a syncing service, not an incremental backup service like Time Machine. So why doesn't Apple let you point Time Machine at an iCloud drive? Nobody knows! It makes no sense.
If Apple let you point Time Machine at an iCloud drive for a small monthly fee, they would get millions of new signups overnight.
I don't have statistics on it but it seems very likely that the latter model gets hugely more uptake.
Suddenly, you had a whole new world of features. Like RADIUS authentication using macOS Server’s (unreliable) Open Directory, directly managing the Airport’s firewall settings & port forwarding for your exposed services (website, wiki, email, XMPP,…)
Such a tight and honestly well done integration. It was fun!
Although ultimately useless since, well… what company would rely on AirPorts for their network & on macOS Server for their online services?
Case in point, macOS server got rid of most of these services in the past few years.
I hope people at least put their old units (sans hard drive or with data well wiped) on ebay or craigslist instead of trashing them.
You can also build your own AFP based one using atalk but I believe that’s the deprecated choice these days.
I use Time Machine to locally connected APFS+ but would be interested to hear of LAN based configurations optimised for performance as non locally connected were always far slower even on g/bit switched
Even worse is that Apples diagnostics are woefully inadequate with missing/useless error messages which makes it much harder to get working again.
Which is such a shame because Time Machine is great in theory (though I'm not a fan of the standard UI at all you can still mount the sparsebundle and it would be great).
Was planning to recycle with Apple if I can’t wipe it.
Priorities. It's a fact of life that disks wear out and fail. If your priority is data integrity, relying on unreliable tests to try to cut down on e-waste contradicts that, since that greatly increases the chance you'll be caught flat-footed and lose data.
- Copy data to them once.
- Have redundant copies of data on multiple devices.
- Once data is copied, catalog it, and put it on a shelf until needed.
They're unlikely to die just sitting there without power, and multiple redundant copies should cover any issues with single-device failure.
Actually they will likely die shortly after you use them again. HDDs have bearings and they are lubricated. The lubricant ages and might even collect at the lowest point in the bearing. Once the disk is powered up after many years the bearings will no longer be properly lubricated they get warm expand and destroy themself. The HDD could run for a few minutes or several hundred hours before it starts to make weird sounds and vibrations and turn itself off to prevent further damage or it keeps going until something dies (common for older models).
>multiple redundant copies should cover any issues with single-device failure.
Certainly needed but in the end its probably not worth the time. I would need dozens of such disks to get the few TB in backup space that I need.
BTW fans in PCs and laptops die for the same reason as described above. Its common for old laptops to make weird noises and overheat after they where left untouched for years.
Unfortunately, disk storage has a pronounced tendency to fail with no warning whatsoever. The only real assurance is multiple independent archived copies. Keeping tabs on health reports is itself a rather error-prone procedure.