AirPort Time Capsule · generations 1–5 · sparsebundles
Apple Time Capsule NAS data recovery. The backup that needs backing up.
The Time Capsule is a one-drive NAS that Apple never called one: a 3.5-inch Seagate or Hitachi drive inside a wireless base station, holding each Mac's Time Machine backup as a sparsebundle disk image. Early units died of power supply capacitors, later ones of ordinary drive wear, and Apple stopped making them in 2018. The unit comes here whole, the drive comes out on the bench, and the sparsebundle is reassembled from the image so that the last snapshot comes back as folders. It is recovered as one drive, £300 + VAT after the free look, and the external drive site covers it in more detail.
Rather talk it through? An engineer answers the bench line
0800 6890668
Models we see, family by family.
Which kind of unit is it →| Family | Models | Bays, OS, file system and layout |
|---|---|---|
| Generations 1–5 | 500GB to 3TB | 1 drive · HFS+ · sparsebundles |
What tends to go wrong on a Apple Time Capsule.
Apple Time Capsule symptoms, and how long each gives you.
Not listed? Describe it on the form →What the message means on a Apple Time Capsule.
Describe yours to us →| What you see | The usual reason | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| Unit dead; drives spin | PSU or board | Drives imaged; set assembled from the metadata |
| Volume missing after a reboot | A member dropped, or the file system damaged | Imaged; assembled; repaired on the image |
| No manufacturer software any more | The brand has gone | Not needed; the layers are standard Linux |
| Drives read as unformatted in a PC | ext3, ext4 or XFS on mdadm | Mounted from the images |
From the box arriving to your files going back.
Work we have closed →Logged the day it lands, and the first look costs nothing Free
A case number goes on the parcel and a number on every drive the day it is opened, and an engineer settles what has actually happened before anything spins. The unit is examined on its own; each drive is assessed on our own equipment, never in a NAS that will try to rebuild. Back to you come two things together: a straight note of what is liftable and what is not, plus one figure, fixed and written down. Accept it, or decline and owe us nothing.
The unit, and the drives, apart
The box and the disks are two different jobs. The unit is tested separately, because a dead power supply, a failed board or a bricked boot flash leaves the drives untouched more often than not. Each drive is then read on the bench: the ones that answer at full speed, and the weak or failed ones in clean air where they need head work. On units that hold an encryption key or a layout of their own, the unit is part of the data and is kept with it.
Every member imaged, once
Nothing is worked on live and nothing is rebuilt on the originals. Every drive in the set is imaged sector by sector, the weak ones head by head with the bad areas last, and the SSD cache with them where there is one. From then on the originals are not touched again.
The set put back together, from the images
Order, chunk size, parity rotation and the reshape point are read from the drives' own metadata and the array is reassembled in software: mdadm and LVM under SHR, X-RAID and QTS pools; a ZFS pool imported read-only; Drobo's BeyondRAID zones reconstructed. The file system, Btrfs, ext4, XFS or ZFS, is repaired on the virtual volume, and encrypted volumes are unlocked there with the key you supply. Never on the originals.
You see the file list before you pay
What was recovered is listed for you first, and only then does a bill exist. Approve the list and it is invoiced; turn it down and it is not — and where nothing has come back, most jobs carry no charge at all. Recovered data travels home on fresh media bought in for your job, with the postage at our end. Your case is not closed until you have opened the files on a machine of your own.
From the bench
- The brand has gone; the layout has not. These units are mdadm and an ext or XFS file system, read from images without the maker.
- Years off is not years safe for the drives inside, which stick and seize like any others. Let the bench bring them up once.
- Do not buy a used unit of the same model to try the drives in. It offers to initialise them, and some do without asking.
What helps, and what harms.
Do this much first
- Power down and label the bays
- Send every drive and the unit
- Tell us the model and what it last did
- Say what you hope is on it
What sets us back
- Trying the drives in another unit
- Initialising drives a PC shows as unformatted
- Powering it repeatedly to see
- Opening the drives
Questions answered before you commit.
Should I take the drive out myself?
Send the unit whole. A sparsebundle copied in part is not a backup, and the drive may be worn. The drive comes out on the bench.
Can a PC read the drives from my Apple Time Capsule?
No. They carry a Linux volume, usually over mdadm, and a PC offers to initialise them. They are mounted from images on the bench.
What does it cost?
£300 + VAT for a single-drive unit; any set is £500 + VAT upwards, fixed in writing after the free look.
How long does it take?
5–10 days at the bench for a set; 3–4 days at the bench for a single drive.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
Nothing gets worse while it is powered down.
Looking at it is free. Back comes a list of what opened and what did not, together with a single price to finish, set down in writing while you are still free to say no. On most jobs an invoice only follows the data. Until that list reaches you, leave the unit off and the drives in their bays.