I say "Bring out".. It was already there, it just wasn't plugged in since the move.

... And so, I trawled the drawer-of-cables to see if I could find the MacMini's plug..

-=-=-

My quest to find the perfect NAS setup has ended up with me plugging the old MacMini from 2015 back in, to see if I can make use of that.
I plugged it in, turned it on, and Windows tried to boot..
.. Because, back in 2015, I was avoiding MacOS like the plague!!!

But it didn't quite make it.
Somewhere along the way, Windows gave up trying to boot.
I grabbed the iPad and asked Bing how to boot up to MacOS.
Command, Option, R and P together, whilst turning it on.
... Three hands later, and I had the MacMini booting up to MacOS.
SLOWLY!!!
With an... euuuuw, mechanical hard drive..

But it did, and I cleared out the garbage that was on it, and got things running as well as could be expected.
After several hours of faffing away, updates and updates and updates, and OMG the updates, I managed to get things to a decent enough quality of life, at which point I shared a folder with my MacBook, and set off the backup.

It's the next day.. and it's currently saying it has 6 days remaining on the backup, but that's not because it's slow or the HDD's crap.
I mean, it kind of is that, but not entirely.
It's because my backup includes hundreds and thousands of tiny little files, like the Platdude Pixelart, and all the games with tons of sprites and all the little .wav files, and more.
There's over 600,000 files to backup, once you include both the JNK/ folder and the Server/ folder.
That also includes all my music, both in "in-progress" forms as well as final forms, in .wav, HQ.mp3 and LQ.mp3.

And it's all being copied across, one file at a time.
Bit by bit..

It now says it'll take 16 hours. And yet it hasn't taken me 5 days to write this post!
The estimate is jumping up and down like a yoyo, as estimates do, as the backup switches between thousands of tiny files and the occasional giant one.

.. Should be done by next Tuesday, I reckon.

Then the big test will be how quick a normal daily backup takes. If that's "quick enough", then the MacMini will likely stay plugged in, doing odd little tasks in the background, and being nice and handy.
Hook up a decent sized external drive, and all my media can be plonked onto there, too.
.. And, who knows, if it's "really" handy, I might even upgrade it to a newer "not almost a decade old" model!

*shrugs*


"Cartoon @Derek desperately searches through a pile of cables to find just the right wire for the job." by #ArtFlow.ai