Apple time capsule equivalent alternative

I’m trying to find an alternative to the Airport Time Capsule for my boss’ home. As I’m sure you know, Time Capsule is designed to work as a router AND a backup device. However, I had the Time Capsule set up in bridge mode, connected to the home’s existing routers. Apple says they don’t support this, as it’s not a long-term viable option. I think they were right, because the back-ups just stopped eventually and I tried for hours to figure it out, but nothing was working. Now, I’m considering a NAS device. The computer that’s being backed up is 3TB, so I need 3-4TB space. My boss is adamant about not backing up to the cloud, so I think a NAS is right, but I’ve heard people say that it’s not a foolproof solution (what if it crashes or fails?). One IT guy I spoke to recommended getting a regular external hard drive, keep it plugged into my boss’ home desktop and set it up to be shared over the network, so his laptop backs up to that. What are your thoughts on that idea? I need something that works perfectly with Time Machine, and something that won’t be too terribly difficult for a layman like me to set up.

You probably don’t want to connect anything to your computer, it is not convenient and also easy to forget. It would probably be the cheapest option but it is very unpractical. NAS you can set up as Time machine once and you can forget about it.

For extra safety, you can do weekly or monthly offsite backup by connecting simple external drive into a NAS USB port. This will automatically create second backup copy for keeping your data safe in case of disasters such as flood or fire.

If you want – NAS can do Access point function as well. Very similar to Apple time capsule. To make it as a wireless access point, plug in Wifi dongle in one of the USB ports and do a quick bridging setup. There are many compatible dongle brands like:

• Linksys AE1200
• Linksys AE3000
• D-Link DWA-140

There are many NAS options which will easily replace your time capsule setup. The question is- how much space do you need an how reliable it needs to be. You can start with simple 1 drive option like DS115j or DS118. In case of a drive failure, you will need to recover from your backup. Two drive option like DS218j or DS218+ will continue working even if one drive we break. But in this protection mode, you get capacity of only one drive- because other is used as a mirror in case of one drive fails. DS418j or DS418 will let you have 4 drives inside and with a RAID5 protection mechanism enabled you will have a capacity of 3 drive. One drive will be sacrificed – so that any drive can fail, but you can still use the NAS with no data loss.

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