AirPort Time Capsule - Security of Time Capsule Data with Password Protection

I have a Airport Time Capsule (vintage 2013) , backing up my iMac (Late 2013), all working Fine.

It might be another discussion, but the Time Capsule's power supply and hard drive are overdue to fail at 6-7 years, so you have had very good luck with your Time Capsule. However, it would not be a good idea to keep any data on the Time Capsule hard drive that you cannot afford to lose......unless.....you have that data backed up on other hard drives.

When i read articles @ support.apple ........HT201945 , It leaves me wondering if you follow the advice for those that forget their Passwords....are they just resetting the WiFi Passwords ?

It depends on whether you have separate passwords for the Base Station, Network, and Disk. (Some users set their Time Capsule's up to use the same password for the base station, network and disk. And some set up the Time Capsule to use the same password for the base station and disk, and a separate password for the WiFi network.)

So, a much better way to change the name of the Base Station or any of the passwords would be to use Airport Utility. Once you have the application open, click on the Base Station tab to change the Base Station name and/or password.

To change the name and/or password of the WiFi network, click on the WiFi tab

To set up a separate password for the Time Capsule disk, click on the Disks tab. If you do not set up a separate password for the Time Capsule disk, then the Base Station password will be used as the disk password by default.

Truth be known......."security" on a Time Capsule is pretty much laughable. Any savvy Mac user with physical access to the Time Capsule can very quickly and easily perform a Soft, Hard or Factory Default Reset on a Time Capsule and change everything, so they would have easy access to the data stored on the Time Capsule hard drive.

Q : is it easier to migrate from a functioning Catalina iMac(late 2013) to an out of the box Big Sur iMac ........ vs having to getting a new Mac running from an External BackUp Disc ?

A new Mac with Big Sur already installed would eliminate the need to erase the Mac's hard drive and reinstall the operating system. You would use Migration Assistant on the Big Sur Mac to move over all the data from a Time Machine backup, minus the operating system files.

But, you might also want to keep in mind that there are numerous reports of new Macs using the M1 chip that are having issues with trying to migrate data from Time Machine backups made with older Macs. This appears to be an M1 issue from everything that I've seen.

APFS ....Is there any significant advantage to having the Format of Mac SSD & External Disc used as BackUp the same (APFS) ?

Sure. Say your Mac's hard drive is formatted in APFS. If you try to back up to an external drive or Time Capsule that is formatted in HFS+ (Mac OS Extended (Journaled), Time Machine will have to try to reformat the backup files from APFS to HFS+. If you want to restore a file, Time Machine has to convert it back from HFS+ to APFS.

Gosh, I wonder what could go wrong with this extra complexity.

It's even more of a challenge with a Time Capsule......since the Time Capsule drive cannot be formatted in APFS. That might help explain why there have been so many Time Machine issues with Big Sur Macs and Time Capsules.

Time Machine Software problems...is it more associated with External HDD's than External SSD's ?

I don't know. What I do know is that there are a lot more issues with Time Machine backing up to a network drive.....like a Time Capsule or NAS.....than to a "local" drive that is connected directly to a Mac, especially since the intro of Big Sur.

I'm almost confident enough now in my Replacement Set-Up of Two Portable Storage Samsung SSD T5 1TB, to delete all my 2013 - 2021 Time Capsule Data (gulp) .

You can buy a cheap spinning rust USB external drive.. perfectly adequate for backups and archive your TC if you wish to keep all the old backups. Archive function is included on the same disk tab as erase. See screenshots Bob made above.

It will take perhaps a day if the 2TB drive is full. Remember the disk you buy must be the same size or larger than the TC internal drive and formatted HFS+.

Note all my answers to your following questions are offered with some limitation of experience. I am using old computers still and do not use encrypted drives due to slow downs. Take with as much salt as needed.. maybe buckets full.

Would it be possible to use the iMac OSx to encrypt my Data?

Yes.. but you will need to look at the details for your particular Mac OS.

As far as backups are concerned you must leave encryption to the Time Machine App when using a Time Capsule or other network drive. For local drive I am not sure the difference.

Is there any advantage using Apple's Encryption vs Samsungs encryption ( which i think is a SSD T5 chip on-board internally).

Don't have one to comment. Either would work well I am sure. Best idea is to trial it yourself. Do a backup with one disk using Samsung onboard encryption and another using inbuilt Mac OS. Tell us your results.

In the situation where my iMac HD fails, is the Samsung SSD T5 capable of being used to fetch Data and /or set up a new iMac, , as long as I plug it into a Mac OSX & the password is correct? (System Files and applications are included in the back-Up)

Recovery method depends loads on what OS you are running.

On the older Mac OS you can either do a clean install of OS followed by using Migration Assistant.

Or boot to the recovery partition and use Setup Assistant to restore the hard disk exactly as you had it. In this instance an encrypted disk is likely a major pain. The Time Machine built in encryption is fine as Apple will have sorted that out.

From Big Sur you must clean install and use migration assistant.

Or use a decent clone software like CCC already mentioned. There are tricks and ways around Apple's boot limitations.

In the next year or two i will be getting a new iMac or mac Mini.

If my backup is formatted in mac OS Journaled / mac OS Journaled encrypted or APFS does it make the restoring everything easier, one Format vs the other ?

Backups prior to Big Sur must use HFS+ (Mac OS Journaled)

The encrypted disk is still written on same format.. just data is not directly readable.

Backups from Big Sur must use APFS. It can still read old backups for use with Migration Assistant.

Your questions are likely not relevant since the limitations of each OS will dictate what you can do.

See the bare info Apple provide here.

https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/mac-help/mh21241/mac

The way i see it...there is alot of Airport Time Capsule Owners out there still using the discontinued ATC & they , at some point have to choose a new Third Party Storage solution.

Exactly.. I still use a TC only to answer questions on this forum.. Otherwise I have a Synology NAS and a local desktop type USB drive plugged into the computer.. Neither using Time Machine as it is unreliable.. I use CCC with the occasional TM backup to test things.. and it can still be useful in terms of contextual recovery of a file. Otherwise CCC is hugely superior.

The Airport routers do still have good security at least from an internet / WAN point of view. This is one aspect of Apple products they do very well. The Airports use NetBSD firmware which is known for security.

Just so you are aware,

Allow setup over WAN access must be turned off. The Airport will show an error if turned on.

This option will only show up if the Airport is setup as your main router otherwise not present.

Of course if you setup the network with a different router and the Airport is working in the network with the bridge mode option it is really important to have a decent base station password. And a good main router security. The Airport uses SMB1 protocol which is vulnerable to attack.

100% agree with Bob concerning physical access. The big weakness in security which Apple made deliberately to help users is the ability to do a soft reset.. then get all the passwords including disk access. It is the only router I know of that even has option to find all the passwords in the setup. The soft reset will allow about 5min of access and then return to normal operation. So as owner you would not even know someone has accessed the unit.. which you will know if someone does a full reset but does not have the info required to redo the Airport setup.

You should remember this in terms of who comes into the house..

At the point of disposal of Time Capsule, data access is trivial to anyone who gets their hands on the unit. The disk must be wiped or you should be doing encrypted Time Machine backups. Or both. Keep in mind a dead TC cannot use erase function so the disk needs removal.

I checked and the "allow SetUp Over Wan" is Not Enabled . So i'm good there.

It would give you a warning if turned on..

I dug this up from another post.

Apple will basically not allow ignore on this one.. so unchecking setup over wan is easy.

For some reason it was on by default after a reset on earlier firmware.. that might have changed more recently.

Maybe what i can do is erase the Disk and then start new back -up 's , with just my music and photos (Exclude Documents ) as part of back-up.

Sure but the vital stuff would still be backed up. eg settings and passwords .. Most serious to me.. if user X wanted your bank account details and password or to steal identity it is possible user X could get that info from a time machine backup that wasn't encrypted. Not easy but possible.

What model is your TC? 2013 is change over year from N wifi version to the tower AC wifi version. The disk in the early version is easy to remove.. much harder in the later one.

If you are trying to extend the life of the unit as far as possible, you could consider leaving the TC internal disk blank and plugging in a USB drive. Backups to the USB are much slower.. Max out around 15MByte/s whereas internal disk is good for about 40MB/s .. still not fast but better. If you are only using it occasionally running a backup overnight is no big issue.

Taking into account how much longer encrypted backups are for Time Machine it still works out pretty well.

Also I would strongly recommend using a different backup software.. eg Carbon Copy Cloner. It is far more reliable than Time Machine and far more flexible.

If you are interested, there is a reasonably good way to protect Time Machine backups on the Time Capsule, but it requires that you set up an "Encryption" password for the backup file......before.....you run the first Time Machine backup.

The downside is that the encryption process takes 3-4 times longer for backups to complete.....and.....there is no way to reset the encryption password if you happen to lose it or forget it.

Now i use the iMac Time Machine app to set up the SSD T5 ready for first iMac Time Machine BackUp. Time Machine doesn't agree with my Format APFS selection and reformats it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). I think that is a Catalina Thing and when i get a new Mac with Big Sur and beyond i can reformat in APFS if advantageous. ( Note the iMac Catalina HDD is APFS Format.)

When/if you move up to Big Sur,, the Time Machine backups will continue on the backup drive in Mac OS Extended (Journaled). They won't automatically start to backup in APFS when you move over to Big Sur.

If you want to use APFS to back up the Big Sur Mac, you will need to erase the existing backup drive, or use another blank drive and start a new backup.

It's your call, but personally I would not trust Time Machine as my sole backup plan and instead back up additionally using an application like Carbon Copy Cloner, commonly known as CCC. ( I have no interest in CCC other than that as a very satisfied user).

So i'm hoping ........If my iMac HDD should ever fail, the SSD T5 BackUp will be able to restore all my Data and Apps, from the Catalina Environment to BigSur and beyond, on my newer Replacement Mac.

The world changed with Big Sur. With previous operating systems it used to be possible to restore your entire Mac (including the operating system) using Migration Assistant. That is no longer possible with Big Sur. Instead, you must now completely erase the Mac's hard drive and install the Big Sur operating system, then use Migration Assistant to transfer data from a Time Machine backup back over to the Mac. In theory, things should work.