Build Your Own Time Capsule Work-Alike For $200 208
An anonymous reader writes "If you're a Windows or Linux user, or simply an Apple user that can't justify the $500 price tag on those beautiful 3TB Time Capsules, why not build your own? With a wireless router, an external USB hard drive, and a little bit of setting up, you can make your own wireless, network-attached backup device for around $200."
Summary (Score:5, Informative)
"If you have a wireless router with a USB port for external storage, then you can map said external storage to a drive (or volume, as appropriate) on your computer. And then you can use whatever backup solution you have available by pointing at that drive/volume."
Re:Lack of polish (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, geeks have been doing versioning backup systems for ages, and what Apple does is not new by any stretch of the imagination
Actually, it's pretty novel. No other *NIX systems that I'm aware of permitted hard linking directories. Doing this with Time Machine was a pretty neat trick. Any directories that haven't been modified are just hard links to the previous version. Directories that have been modified contain hard links to files in the previous version. The copy-on-write support in ZFS is a more elegant way of doing this (just clone the backup volume and apply changes), but Apple managed it without needing to modify anything other than the VFS layer.
The thing that Time Capsule adds is basically the ability for a remote device to issue an fsync command. When Time Machine finishes running, it knows that the data is safe on the Time Capsule's disk, not in some cache somewhere. Again, not a massive improvement, but an attention to detail that's important if you care about your data.
It's still a little too basic in some areas for more technical users - I'd like to be able to query at a glance what files were backed up,
This is trivial to do. Just look at the time machine snapshot. ls -R will give you all of the information that you want.