Time capsule and general storage set-up considerations
Hello there,
I am new here, despite the fact that I am a Mac owner since 1994, when I bought my first PowerMac 6100. So, please forgive me any wrongdoing or disregarding of any unwritten forum rules that I might step over. Should that happen it is totally unintentionally.
Currently, I have two iMacs in my household, a 2015 27" Retina and an older (2011-ish) also 27". The older one used to be our children's computer whereas the newer is my and my wife's workplace. That was until recently, when (most likely) the graphic card of the old one died. As a result of the death of the older iMac, I migrated the children's user profiles to the newer iMac. As a result of this, the new iMac apparently also adopted the older computer's name ("children's iMac", for the sake of reference), which was totally unintentional and also undesirable. But as all network functions continued to work normally I did not do anything about it because I feared that any tampering with the computer's name might do exactly that: cause the network functionality and thus internet connectivity to fail. Well, but that is actually just a side note here. Any input on it is nevertheless highly welcome though.
With the migration there was also a lot of data transferred and as I am quite a serious hobby photographer, our Retina iMac's internal storage capacity slowly gets filled up to the limit (the usable amount of 4 TB). This Retina iMac's storage has been continuously backed up on a Time Capsule (TC) of also 4 TB capacity. The children's iMac has 1 TB internal storage which used to be backed up on an older TC model with - yes you guess correctly - 1 TB capacity as well.
With the storage capacity slowly running out, I started to find out about save storage solutions and finally bought a Synology DS918+ NAS with 4 Seagate Ironwolf 6 TB HDDs in it. These are configured in RAID 6 fashion and provide totally a bit more than 10 TB in a single logical volume.
Just after purchasing this beast, I stumbled over an article that convinced me of the obvious (which was not so obvious to me before I read that article): Just the fact that it is a RAID does not make it a save back-up!
Hence I ended up with telling Time Machine to no longer use the TC for the regular back-ups but the NAS, which works in principle well but as my Network is not the fastest it took about 20 hours for the first back-up to complete. This raises a question that I will revisit further down.
For now, let's stick to may main issue here: Now, I am left with a robust level 1 back-up solution but still haven't solved the storage capacity issue, unless I "downgrade" the TC to a simple external storage drive and therefore end up with 4 TB internally + 4 TB on the TC. Perhaps I could even use the old 1 TB TC as well and add that to the primary storage capacity also. 9 TB in total should do for now and would also work nicely with the 10 TB of back-up RAID. This raises 2 questions though:
1) Can the TCs be configured that way and if so, what would I need to do?
2) Is there a way to connect them to the Thunderbolt 2 (TB2) socket of the Retina iMac to overcome the somewhat sluggish network connections?
3) If so, what kind of adapter from the TB2 to the either the RJ45 or USB sockets of the TC would I need to purchase?
I think the answers to question 2) & 3) would probably also be the answer to the question about improving the data transfer rate between iMac and NAS.
One last thing, which is storage unrelated though: Would there still be replacement graphic cards for 2011 27" iMacs available? If so, I could try and give the children's iMac a second life.
Thanks to those who had the patience to read thus far. I hope I did not bore anyone to death.
I am looking forward to any responses from this superbly potent knowledge base formed by the vast apple community.
I am new here, despite the fact that I am a Mac owner since 1994, when I bought my first PowerMac 6100. So, please forgive me any wrongdoing or disregarding of any unwritten forum rules that I might step over. Should that happen it is totally unintentionally.
Currently, I have two iMacs in my household, a 2015 27" Retina and an older (2011-ish) also 27". The older one used to be our children's computer whereas the newer is my and my wife's workplace. That was until recently, when (most likely) the graphic card of the old one died. As a result of the death of the older iMac, I migrated the children's user profiles to the newer iMac. As a result of this, the new iMac apparently also adopted the older computer's name ("children's iMac", for the sake of reference), which was totally unintentional and also undesirable. But as all network functions continued to work normally I did not do anything about it because I feared that any tampering with the computer's name might do exactly that: cause the network functionality and thus internet connectivity to fail. Well, but that is actually just a side note here. Any input on it is nevertheless highly welcome though.
With the migration there was also a lot of data transferred and as I am quite a serious hobby photographer, our Retina iMac's internal storage capacity slowly gets filled up to the limit (the usable amount of 4 TB). This Retina iMac's storage has been continuously backed up on a Time Capsule (TC) of also 4 TB capacity. The children's iMac has 1 TB internal storage which used to be backed up on an older TC model with - yes you guess correctly - 1 TB capacity as well.
With the storage capacity slowly running out, I started to find out about save storage solutions and finally bought a Synology DS918+ NAS with 4 Seagate Ironwolf 6 TB HDDs in it. These are configured in RAID 6 fashion and provide totally a bit more than 10 TB in a single logical volume.
Just after purchasing this beast, I stumbled over an article that convinced me of the obvious (which was not so obvious to me before I read that article): Just the fact that it is a RAID does not make it a save back-up!
Hence I ended up with telling Time Machine to no longer use the TC for the regular back-ups but the NAS, which works in principle well but as my Network is not the fastest it took about 20 hours for the first back-up to complete. This raises a question that I will revisit further down.
For now, let's stick to may main issue here: Now, I am left with a robust level 1 back-up solution but still haven't solved the storage capacity issue, unless I "downgrade" the TC to a simple external storage drive and therefore end up with 4 TB internally + 4 TB on the TC. Perhaps I could even use the old 1 TB TC as well and add that to the primary storage capacity also. 9 TB in total should do for now and would also work nicely with the 10 TB of back-up RAID. This raises 2 questions though:
1) Can the TCs be configured that way and if so, what would I need to do?
2) Is there a way to connect them to the Thunderbolt 2 (TB2) socket of the Retina iMac to overcome the somewhat sluggish network connections?
3) If so, what kind of adapter from the TB2 to the either the RJ45 or USB sockets of the TC would I need to purchase?
I think the answers to question 2) & 3) would probably also be the answer to the question about improving the data transfer rate between iMac and NAS.
One last thing, which is storage unrelated though: Would there still be replacement graphic cards for 2011 27" iMacs available? If so, I could try and give the children's iMac a second life.
Thanks to those who had the patience to read thus far. I hope I did not bore anyone to death.
I am looking forward to any responses from this superbly potent knowledge base formed by the vast apple community.
Comments
In answer to your questions:
1) Can the TCs be configured that way and if so, what would I need to do?
No.
2) Is there a way to connect them to the Thunderbolt 2 (TB2) socket of the Retina iMac to overcome the somewhat sluggish network connections?
and
3) If so, what kind of adapter from the TB2 to the either the RJ45 or USB sockets of the TC would I need to purchase?
Technically, you can connect the Time Capsule through a Thunderbolt to Ethernet adapter, but it will be no faster than what you're doing now.
Further backups will be incremental. They will only change what needs to be changed, so they won't all take 20 hours.
Regarding the GPU on the 2011 -- maybe. You'd have to hit eBay, though.
Do I get this right? There is no way of using the TC simply as an external drive rather than as a back-up volume being fed by Time Machine?