when i bought the 2021 the apple techs said it would work with time capsule, either they are misinformed or plain ignorant to the facts. i thought i covered all my bases and trusted them and their information they relayed to me.
i will Give it a whirl and see what happens.
Most users have been able to make things work in general, but as I said there are more complications with this type of backup, so more things to potentially create issues.
Technically, this is what is happening with Macs running Big Sur and Monterey that are backing up to the Time Capsule:
The Time Capsule drive cannot be formatted in APFS, so Time Machine creates a sparsebundle file (that is formatted in APFS) on the Time Capsule.....which is formatted in HFS+.......so the backup process becomes tricky and complicated.
As far as using SSD or a conventional spinning drive for backups. There are of course no real moving parts on the SSD, so it gets the nod as far a reliability. The real issue here is the Time Machine application can only back up at limited speeds, so backups to an SSD will be no faster than backups to conventional spinning disk.
In other words, Time Machine cannot take advantage of the normally faster speeds with SSD, so users who spend the extra money to get faster backup speeds are disappointed to find that the SSD backups are about the same speed as regular spinning drive backups.
It's a judgement call with no real right or wrong answers. Some users cannot justify the extra expense for SSDs and some can.
i thought the DATA was stored on the Time Capsule, im kind of really confused.
The data in the backups is always stored inside a special type of file called a sparsebundle on the Time Capsule. In other words, Time Machine cannot back up directly to the hard drive on the Time Capsule.
Time Machine can back up directly to a hard drive that is connected directly to the Mac, like a USB drive though. So, backups are simpler (and faster) if you are backing up directly to a USB drive connected directly to your Mac. This is called a "local" drive. The Time Capsule is a "network" drive that is connected to your network, so backups have to occur over the network.
with no TimeCapsule i went into Time Machine and i can see and access my Back Ups for 2 days. so something is storing on the 2012 MBPro.
Time Machine temporarily stores "snapshot" backups on your Mac's hard drive if the Time Capsule is not connected or not available.....and..... if there is plenty of free space on the Mac's hard drive. Later, the "snapshots" are consolidated and stored as regular backups on the Time Capsule. When that occurs, the older snapshots are deleted from the Mac to make room for new temporary "snapshots".
okay i am ready to do my first Back Up to the new Time Capsule. The way ive done the 1st Back ups in the past is, do one then do a second one right after to be sure it is all there.
After the first backup is done, Time Machine still has to index all the data stored in the backup, which can take 4-6 hours or more. So, you may not be able to view the new backup in Time Machine for a few hours or so.