my Time Capsule just died

The model number is A1254 and it's copyright 2007.

I have a genius appt in a couple of days to upgrade to a newer model with hopefully better ventilation design. All I need is a way to get the backup data transferred to the newer model. I'm hoping an Apple tech will do it but, if not, I'm going to have to take the old disk out and figure out how to transfer the data myself.

Thanks.

Thanks for the response. Apple Care indicated there's a way to initialize a new time capsule using an external drive (usb, I assume). Could this be the removed disk, put in a standard USB to SATA cradle and plugged into the new time capsule? Or is that approach still reliant on first having 'archived' to an external disk using the old time capsule (which, of course is impossible because the PS is shot)?

Thanks

I understand the TC is dead. And I don't think Applecare was suggesting they could bring it back to life. I certainly wasn't.

But I distinctly heard Applecare saying they would help. And, I have to assume they understood the old TC was dead and that "helping" would require physically extracting its hard disk in order to initialize the new TC with my current backup 'state'.

If it turns out that I do have to physically extract the disk myself and provide the new TC the most accurate (and working) representation of that old backup disk I'll be sure to ask the genius bar techs what's involved - and with my BS filters in full deployment.

I'll report back my experience for those who are interested.

Thanks

Sigh... Apple Policy appears to be to avoid all possibility of liability; my Genius tech wanted to do it (i.e. remove the drive) but his supervisor wouldn't allow it, ostensibly because it would be necessary to slice the rubber base in order to remove it.

They obviously didn't know that just heating it would soften the glue to allow the base to be peeled off; which is what I did. I now have the disk in a nice enclosure and connected to my MacBookPro. Three partitions appear: APconfig, APswap and TimeCapsule.

Unfortunately my Genius tech couldn't advise me on how to accomplish a "copy" or "restore" of the old backups because, unlike the scenario assumed by Apple, my internet access is via my smartphone - I live in the countryside now where there are no cable-provider means to access the internet. Instead, I connect my new TC to my MBP via an ethernet cable and share the internet via that connection. For a while both my TC and my Airport Express were confirmed to be available via the Airport Utility, giving me some hope of success.

Unfortunately, the new TC eventually fell off the Airport Utility's list of devices (as did my Airport Express) and as a result TC can be found by neither the Disk Utility nor Time Machine.

It's time to reboot everything, I suppose, and start over in a way that prevents my MBP from falling asleep which, I suspect is what cause my devices to "disappear". FYI, I want to use the Disk Utility to restore my backup partition because my experience suggests a restore is likely far more efficient than copying a tree of 234 million files.

If this scenario rings any bells for you please provide some feedback.

Thanks

Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to respond until my restore failed at roughly the 600 GB mark - I really didn't want to touch anything while that was going on.

Tethered or using it as hotspot??

Tethered to my MBP and shared to my new TC via ethernet cable. Note that I don't use my MBP just as a router. I do real work (iOS development) on my MBP.

If you are dependent on 3G/4G then I would buy a 3G router.

For network performance reasons I am dependent on LTE but perhaps there are also LTE routers and I may invest in one when I'm tired of using my MBP as a router. (Or should I say, bridge?)

El Capo is seemingly the worst of the lot.. it is not reliable on the network.

I'm running El Capo 10.11.1 and it appears to have worked well on the network for at least 600 GB of restoration. No doubt, I'm just a (mostly) lucky guy.

When the TC is lost it is going to need some more work on configuration.

Actually no, at least not in the way you might be imagining. All I had to do was restart my MBP, re-share my tethered iPhone 5 to the ethernet cable, and wait a few minutes. The TC's blinking amber light - indicating that there was no internet available now (even though there was none available through 600 GB of restore activity (more on that later)) - switched to green. Note that the Airport Utility running on my restarted MBP doesn't find the new TC because sharing through the ethernet connection doesn't substitute for WiFi (my Doh!) and my MBP's WiFi was off. When I turned my MBP's WiFi on, Airport Utility found the new TC. But, now, AirPort Utility says the internet is unavailable, even though all my devices are happy with internet access via my new TC's WiFi router. (Have I discovered a bug or just exposed my lack of configuration options for a MBP?)

But, at this point I don't care about internet access. I only need WiFi access now.

You cannot use Disk Utility to restore from a TM backup.

Ok, I hear you but I didn't see your assertion until I hit the restore write failure at roughly 600 GB. Here's where I started from. I figured that if it could be done in 2010 with Disk Utility then it should be possible to do in 2015. In a nutshell, I

1. ensured that Time Machine was using my new TC disk.

2. aborted a Time Machine backup immediately after the "preparing" phase

3. used Disk Utility to restore my USB attached old TC disk's Time Capsule partition to my network attached new TC's Time Machine Backups partition created by the "prepare" phase of the aborted Time Machine backup.

3.5 after restoring for about 24 hours (maybe 400 GB; it's hard to be accurate when all you have is a tape measure) it occurred to me that if I stopped sharing the internet through the ethernet connection that connection might be used for the restore at considerably higher throughput

4. 200 GB and 4 hours later (definitely improved performance!) the restore fails with some sort of write error (code256? I forgot to take a picture)

My uneducated guess is that the partition created in the "prepare" phase is limited in size to roughly 600 GB because my MBP hard disk is only 500 GB in size. The reason Disk Utility can't do it is because it doesn't know how to extend that partition to accommodate my old 998 GB Time Capsule volume/partition. But, thinking about it more just raises more questions like "Why didn't Disk Utility tell me it couldn't extend the volume before teasing me with 600 GB f restoration?"

We always suggest NOT using old backups

Really? I can't think of a single good reason why. I should point out that without a good reason for why "You cannot use Disk Utility..." I would have tried anyway.

Thanks for listening.