I bought my first Mac in 2014 when I was studying Music Production at university, and the first thing I did was buy a 2TB external hard drive to do all of my backups and keep all of my work safe. To cut a long story short, it died within two years at the same time that a macOS update failed to install on my MacBook. I lost all of my backups, Apple wiped my drive on my MacBook, and I had a lot of university work to catch up on.
Fast forward a couple of years, and I decided to get myself a 2TB AirPort Time Capsule, so that I didn’t have to mess around plugging in hard drives. At the time that I picked up the AirPort, I had also recently picked up my first Mac desktop computer, so having the AirPort allowed me to wirelessly back up my Macs and share content easily between them. It was a no-brainer.
I later created a Windows-based server in my home, which handles all of my media sharing, but for some reason, the speeds are atrocious in comparison to the AirPort when it comes to file sharing. Not having network smarts, I didn’t know how to fix it, so I gave up and stuck with the AirPort Time Capsule.
A couple of years ago, I upgraded the hard drive in my Time Capsule to a beefy 10TB drive, and I haven’t looked back. That was until Apple recently announced that they were dropping support, not only for the device, but also for its file system. I am gutted.
My AirPort has been like a spinal column between my Macs. Bob Dylan said it best with his song, The Times They Are A-Changin’.
I guess that now I should plan to remove my 10TB drive from the AirPort, copy the data out of it, and connect it directly to my Mac Mini as a network shared drive. If I wanted to get technical, I suppose I could set it up with a Raspberry Pi and see if I can get some semblance of similarity to the AirPort. I’ve got some options to explore, I guess. Thankfully, I work in IT, so I should be able to pick up some 4TB SSDs and build a RAID setup or something. I don’t know yet. I know a kid who is a dab hand when it comes to this kind of thing, so hopefully he can help.
Anyway, thanks for reading my rambling. Please pour one out for my fallen soldier of an Apple device.
SB.P 