2009 Mac mini, Mac OS X 10.11.6 (El Capitan), 297 GiB internal disk. Being kept only until its data is safe, then repurposed. Reached as root@192.168.0.15 over the OpenSSH 10.5p1 daemon built from source (biz.critchley.openssh) — the vendor sshd is disabled, so that daemon is the only remote way in.
Everything that existed only on this Mac is now also on the WD My Cloud NAS under /mac-mini-archive/ on the Public share. Verified by comparing file counts and total bytes on both sides, not by trusting rsync's exit status — which mattered, because several runs reported success while transferring nothing. Note the Mac is NOT being wiped (John, 2026-09-17): the goal was to get the data off an ancient machine and secured, not to empty it. The originals stay where they are.
Everything that existed only on this Mac is now also on the WD My Cloud NAS under /mac-mini-archive/ on the Public share. Verified by comparing file counts and total bytes on both sides, not by trusting rsync's exit status — which mattered, because several runs reported success while transferring nothing.
| Source | Files | Bytes | Where it landed |
|---|---|---|---|
| /Users/Isaac (Photos Library) | 804 | 4,140,512,339 | NAS /mac-mini-archive/Isaac/ |
| /Users/Joshua (most) | 8,270 | 38,286,307,563 | NAS /mac-mini-archive/Joshua/ |
| /Users/Joshua (whitespace dirs) | 11 | 5,712,642,196 | NAS .../Joshua/Movies/GameCaptureHD-whitespace-dirs.tar |
| Joshua TOTAL | 8,281 | 43,998,949,759 | matches source exactly |
Elgato's Game Capture HD Library contains directories whose names consist only of spaces — one called " " and one called " " — with files inside them also named with leading spaces (" .json", " .png"). SMB cannot represent such names. The NAS silently mangled them into 8.3-style short names (_2X68Q~7, _IDZPL~P); rsync then created content under the mangled name but kept looking for the original, and failed with failed to stat ... Not a directory (20). Rather than rename them and lose fidelity, those two directories were archived with tar, where the names are just bytes and SMB never sees them. Verified: the archive holds 15 entries / 5,712,642,918 bytes — the 11 real files plus four AppleDouble ._ metadata files (722 bytes), which exactly accounts for the difference.
To restore, extract on a filesystem that permits such names (HFS+/APFS/ZFS/ext4 all do; SMB and NTFS do not):
cd "/somewhere/Game Capture HD Library"
tar xf GameCaptureHD-whitespace-dirs.tar/Users/Joshua/Library/Containers/. CIFS reported Operation not supported. These are macOS app-sandbox links pointing back at the home directory; their targets were all copied. No data lost..photoslibrary this means the bundle may not reopen cleanly as a Photos library on a Mac — but the photographs themselves are ordinary files inside it and are intact. If a bit-faithful, reopenable copy is ever wanted, tar it the same way as above; it is only 3.9 GB./Users/kathy/Movies (55.6 GB) is now accounted for. Most of it was already on the NAS, just not where the name suggests: the loose .m4v films largely matched Shared Videos, and Movies/Library turned out to be music and audiobooks, not video (Pratchett, Harry Potter, CS Lewis, Michel Thomas German courses, plus albums) which matched Shared Music — 5,130 of its 5,208 files were already there. Only 118 files / 3.96 GB were genuinely missing; those were copied to /mac-mini-archive/kathy/Movies/ and verified file-by-file against source sizes (118 of 118, 3,962,013,868 bytes exact). Nothing on this Mac now exists in only one place./Users/Joshua/Library/Containers/. CIFS reported Operation not supported. These are macOS app-sandbox links pointing back at the home directory; their targets were all copied. No data lost..photoslibrary this means the bundle may not reopen cleanly as a Photos library on a Mac — but the photographs themselves are ordinary files inside it and are intact. If a bit-faithful, reopenable copy is ever wanted, tar it the same way as above; it is only 3.9 GB./Users/kathy/Movies (54 GB) was excluded from the earlier WebDAV migration. Some films were copied to the NAS separately, but Movies/Library (~12 GB, iTunes-managed) has never been compared. Still outstanding.The Mac is on the house LAN (192.168.0.0/26, WiFi) and the NAS is on 192.168.99.0/24 behind pomelo, so everything routes through pomelo. Measured at 8.6–8.9 MB/s, and the two possible paths are indistinguishable: rsync-over-SSH pulled by pomelo gave 8.6 MB/s, a direct SMB copy over the new static route gave 8.9 MB/s. The WiFi leg is the bottleneck — 71 Mbit/s effective against a 270 Mbit/s nominal link. SSH encryption is not the constraint despite the 2009 CPU having no AES-NI (cp used 7.8 s of system time for 3.9 GB). If a large transfer is ever needed again, put the Mac on ethernet — nothing else will make a material difference.
/var/root/disabled-legacy-20260917/ with a RESTORE.sh and a WHAT-AND-WHY.txt explaining each. /Library/LaunchDaemons now contains only the two biz.critchley.* plists./usr/local/sbin/route-nineandninety.sh via the LaunchDaemon biz.critchley.route-nineandninety (RunAtLoad plus a 300 s timer, so it also repairs itself if a WiFi reconnect flushes the route). There is a nineandninety entry in /etc/networks, but it is documentation only: route(8) on 10.11 mis-resolves the name to 0.192.0.0 and netstat -r will not display it, so the route is installed numerically./Volumes/nas. It will not survive a reboot; remount with mount_smbfs //guest:@192.168.99.2/Public /Volumes/nas.