All hardware sucks
Five months and two days ago, I ordered this Apple Time Capsule from the Apple Store (I wanted an easy way to do backups from all of the macs here, and I didn’t want to do periodic rsyncs to the much-too-small-for-backups freebsd server that’s been squatting in the basement for the past 5-6 years,) plugged it in, and after two days for the initial backup from the pair of laptops had it settle in to doing hourly backups without fuss muss or bother.
Recently (in the last couple of weeks) I noticed a couple of times where backups would just lose track of the disk and have to be reconnected to the Time Capsule. The network has been kind of flakey, so I wrote it down to that, but sometime last night (a little less than 5 months since I installed the unit) I got the big YOUR BACKUP DEVICE IS SCREWED! message:
~~~ Sep 2 01:34:34 pancake library storage: Volume dk2 on Disk sd0 (SAMSUNG HD103SI 1AG0) needs repair (256). Sep 2 01:34:34 pancake library storage: Volume dk2 on Disk sd0 (SAMSUNG HD103SI 1AG0) failed to mount (256). ~~~
And then when I did a diagnostic reboot this morning, the Time Capsule just didn’t come back.
Oh, now that’s quality engineering for you. At least the g-dd-mn thing is still under warranty, so I can take it down to the Apple Store and, maybe, get the disk removed and replaced with a working part (and maybe get the warranty extended out to a year from the repair? It would be nice to not have to have a 6andchange month warranty period on the new disk.)