Alternatives to Time Capsule

[benboy12]

I am looking for a way to back-up one or more Macs for some family members that are not very tech savvy. I would love to have something automated put in place. I remember that Apple used to have a wireless hard drive (Time Capsule) that you could set up to automatically receive back-ups from a Mac (I believe). I know that the Time Capsule is out of production. What are some good alternatives? Ideally, I would like something that is either wireless or could plus directly into a wireless router/gateway, and would interface well with Time Machine. Also, could one drive be set up to receive back-ups from multiple Macs? I have not had any direct experience with Time Capsules and very little experience with Time Machine, so I apologize if I missing something.

 

[AndyMacAndMic]

I am looking for a way to back-up one or more Macs for some family members that are not very tech savvy. I would love to have something automated put in place. I remember that Apple used to have a wireless hard drive (Time Capsule) that you could set up to automatically receive back-ups from a Mac (I believe). I know that the Time Capsule is out of production. What are some good alternatives? Ideally, I would like something that is either wireless or could plus directly into a wireless router/gateway, and would interface well with Time Machine. Also, could one drive be set up to receive back-ups from multiple Macs? I have not had any direct experience with Time Capsules and very little experience with Time Machine, so I apologize if I missing something.

As far as I know the best alternative to Time Capsule is a NAS (Network Attached Storage).
Effectively Time Capsule was also a NAS (but named 'sexier' by Apple).

There are several brands who make MAC compatible 'NAS'es'. See the following links:
Best NAS Drives for MAC 2019
Time Capsule Alternative
7 best alternatives to Time Capsule

Simply put: a NAS is an external drive/diskstation, connected to the network and visible to all the computers in that network (of course also via Wifi/wireless). You can use the Time Machine application (provided on every MAC) to back up data to the NAS (make sure you buy a 'MAC compatible' NAS).

Also see the following official Apple link (Apple here also mentions a NAS as backup device):
Back up your MAC with Time Machine

Basically the whole procedure is identical to backing up to a Time Capsule.

A NAS can be from cheap (with only one hard drive in them) to expensive (with multiple hard drives in them). The advantage of a NAS with multiple drives is that you can setup the drives to 'back up each other', so that if one drive fails, the data is still available on other drives in the NAS. This is called RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks).

See the following link:
RAID Wiki

An alternative to a NAS is to use the cloud (iCloud, OneDrive etc.). But that depends on how much data you need to backup per family member. It is always a good idea to additionally backup important data (documents, photo's etc.) to the cloud, even if you use a NAS.

The NAS topic is huge, so I try to keep it short here. The links I provided should get you started.

 

[ActionableMango]

What are some good alternatives? Ideally, I would like something that is either wireless or could plus directly into a wireless router/gateway, and would interface well with Time Machine. Also, could one drive be set up to receive back-ups from multiple Macs?

If you keep a Mac on 24x7, you can just turn on file sharing for a backup drive, and have it be a Time Machine backup destination for all of your Macs.

If you don't want to keep a computer on all the time, check your wireless router. Most modern wireless routers have a USB port for network attached storage (NAS), so you may already have a NAS and not even know it. If you are lucky you can simply set the router's storage to be Time Machine compatible. For example my TP-Link router has this option. But most will not be Time Machine compatible. (There are ways of getting around that, but you are looking for easy so I'll leave that out of the equation.)

Yes you can have multiple Macs save their Time Machine backups to the same location.

I strongly agree with @AndyMacAndMic that your most critical files should be in the cloud with a reputable provider.

 

[AustinIllini]

If you keep a Mac on 24x7, you can just turn on file sharing for a backup drive, and have it be a Time Machine backup destination for all of your Macs.

If you don't want to keep a computer on all the time, check your wireless router. Most modern wireless routers have a USB port for network attached storage (NAS), so you may already have a NAS and not even know it. If you are lucky you can simply set the router's storage to be Time Machine compatible. For example my TP-Link router has this option. But most will not be Time Machine compatible. (There are ways of getting around that, but you are looking for easy so I'll leave that out of the equation.)

Yes you can have multiple Macs save their Time Machine backups to the same location.

I strongly agree with @AndyMacAndMic that your most critical files should be in the cloud with a reputable provider.

Yeah, I wanted to do this, but the Eero USB port is for diagnostics only.

 

[LeeW]

I use a QNAP TS-251, I did have a Synology DiskStation before but it was pretty poor performance wise. In fact the QNAP was so good I also now use it as a Plex server, to create Virtual Machines and a few other things.