
Time Capsule for $25 (Using Raspbery Pi) - garmoncheg
http://garmoncheg.blogspot.com/2012/11/time-capsule-for-25.html
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Samuel_Michon
_"Time Capsule for $25"_

A naked Raspberry Pi costs $35. Add an enclosure and shipping, it will be
closer to $60. That doesn't include storage.

Time Capsule contains a 2TB hard disk. The same WD drive retails for $170 at
Amazon.

That brings our total to $230, for a product that doesn't work nearly as well
as a real Time Capsule and for which you won't receive service and support
from Apple.

Or you can just buy a Time Capsule for $299:
<http://store.apple.com/us/product/MD032/time-capsule-2tb>

~~~
CrazedGeek
Where are you getting $170 for a 2TB disk? Amazon has 3TB disks for $130.

~~~
bradleyland
This whole conversation is kind of strange, but let's play along anyway.

If you deal shop, you can get the price down:.

    
    
        [1] $40 Raspberry Pi - Model B, because that's all that's available (includes $5 shipping)
        [2] $10 Enclosure (some DIY required)
        [3] $116 WD 2TB Hard Drive (selected WD because that is [apparently] what Apple uses)
        Total: $166
    

That's an aggressive HD price, and remember, you need an _external_ HDD. A lot
of the pricing being thrown around here is for internal drives. Regular price
on the drive I spec'd was $180. There are always deals to be had though. The
price may be more depending on your timing.

The case I spec'd is extremely DIY as well. If you went with something nicer,
you'd spend more as well. It's kind of hard to justify a crappy case when
you're comparing to a Time Capsule.

So if you add in $20 for a HDD price not-so-on-sale and $10 for a nicer case
(Adafruit is decent), you're looking at $196, which is edging up toward the
cost of a Time Capsule, and that's not factoring in time for configuration.

The whole point here is that you don't do projects like this to save money.
You do projects like this for the fun and learning experience, or to have
greater control/flexibility. If you go in to this project to save money, then
I think you're barking up the wrong tree.

1 - Pick a vendor any vendor (pricing is standard)

2 - [http://blujay.com/item/Black-Electronic-Project-
Box-100-x-60...](http://blujay.com/item/Black-Electronic-Project-
Box-100-x-60-x-25mm-suit-Raspberry-Pi-ABS-Multi-Purpose-4020000-4189163)

3 - [http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-3-5-Inch-Internal-
Desk...](http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-3-5-Inch-Internal-
Desktop/dp/B00471EYUU/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1354305295&sr=8-3&keywords=western+digital+green+2tb)

~~~
CrazedGeek
> The whole point here is that you don't do projects like this to save money.
> You do projects like this for the fun and learning experience, or to have
> greater control/flexibility. If you go in to this project to save money,
> then I think you're barking up the wrong tree.

That was where I was leading it, yeah. Attacking it on a price basis just
seems weird to me.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
_"Attacking it on a price basis just seems weird to me."_

The title of the article is _"Time Capsule for $25"_ , so apparently the
author thought the price is the main selling point. The actual price is way
higher, he set himself up for someone to point that out.

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pepijndevos
Be warned. I used my Raspi with netatalk3 for a while, and it kept corrupting.
I reverted to using an external drive on my Mac.

~~~
wch
I second this warning. I've never used a Raspberry Pi, but I've used netatalk
for years on a Linux server, and after I upgraded OS X 10.7, my backups to it
would get corrupted once every month or two. I think it's not so bad if you
have a wired connection, but wireless backups from a laptop (which can get put
to sleep at any moment) just aren't reliable, for me at least. Also, it would
constantly index my Time Machine backups over wireless, which takes forever
and made my Macbook Air's fan turn on.

I suspect some of this is due to limitations in netatalk's AFP implementation,
but I've never compared to a proper Time Capsule

~~~
solarexplorer
Same here. Apple changed the AFP protocol in Lion and netatalk had trouble
keeping up. But since my last update to netatalk 3.0.1 a month ago I have had
no corruption. (I hope they finally got it right!) The initial backup and
indexing is very painful indeed, but after that it works smoothly. (and
without fan for my MacBook Air)

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trackofalljades
Neat writeup, now please please please search and replace "MAC" with "Mac" so
it doesn't look like it's all about Ethernet hardware addressing or cosmetics?
;)

~~~
avree
I was actually thrown off for a second by the capitalization and possessive
apostrophes.

~~~
TheGateKeeper
It's almost like he didn't have a tech literate editor to fix his fuckups.

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solarexplorer
There is no need to use the buggy HFS instead of the stable Ext3 on Linux. The
backup will be in a disk image anyway...

~~~
TheGateKeeper
Buggy or no, Ext3 is still the better option for linux when doing network
shares for other operating systems since it's pretty transparent anyways.

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tesmar2
It should be noted that journaling on the HFS volume should be off or the
Raspberry pi will not be able to write to it. When I set this up @ home, I
formatted the disk in OS X first with journaling off, and then connected it to
the RSBPi. Very effective, cheap backup solution. You can also then use
crashplan to upload your backups to the cloud as the RSBPi receives them.

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gambiting
Two weeks too late, I set my Raspberry Pi to serve as a Time Machine all by
myself using Raspbian, and boy, it was a massive pain.

As for people saying that the complete setup is almost as expensive as an
actual TimeCapsule - yes,but then I had a spare 500GB drive laying around,and
had no special use for my Raspberry Pi. Thanks to this both of them are used
on a daily basis.

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stcredzero
Time capsules of any sort just aren't so useful anymore. They work fine most
of the time, but they get inconvenient when you have to reinstall or migrate
to a new machine. If you end up doing so and have to re-establish your backup,
it might take 12 or 18 hours or more to do that! Add in the Time Machine
memory leak, and Time Machine/Capsule no longer makes much sense.

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runjake
You could rig up something similar for Windows 8 using this hardware, Samba,
and Windows 8's File History _[1]_ feature, which is similar to Time Machine.

1\.
[http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Windows8Step0TurnOnContinuousB...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Windows8Step0TurnOnContinuousBackupsViaFileHistory.aspx)

~~~
lloeki
While a useful feature, it's only remotely similar in that it keeps an
incremental history of selected user folders, whereas Time Machine backups
_all_ files and gives you a 1:1 (file-level, as opposed to block-level, like
dd/carbon-copy-cloner/ghost) image of your computer, _including the OS_.

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sciurus
Great timing on this post! It reminded me to check on the status of OpenWRT
12.09, and I see that the first release candidate came out a week ago ago.
12.09 includes a netatalk 3 package. If like me you have a wireless router
with USB ports, OpenWRT should provide a great platform for building your own
"time capsule".

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a235
The actual read/write speed should be awfully slow. His screenshot estimates
that 322mb will be transferring 18hours!

~~~
gambiting
I use this and transfer speeds are around 5-6MB/s. That's because both the
hard drive and Ethernet share the USB bus. And it's completely fine, took
around 6 hours to backup 90GB from my MacBook Air.

