A few days ago, I explained how to extract data from a Time Capsule networked drive and Wi-Fi router if you received a warning that you couldn’t back up to it as a destination. That was a “logical” solution, offering advice on archiving and reformatting.
But as Time Capsule age, they’re more likely to fail: the drive dies, the circuit board goes wonky, or the power supply poops out. If you can’t get the Time Capsule to power up or respond, how do you deal with the physical element of its drive? With a dead Time Capsule, you can’t easily extract the hard disk, either to recover it or erase it if you want to pass the unit on—or to destroy it to render the data unrecoverable.