3TB Airport Time Capsule

Using a single drive for your libraries and backups is bad karma. All mechanical drives...only question is when not if.

Use you TC to generate your wifi network, provide some network IP ports, provide a network USB port, and backup of your Macs. Get a separate drive for your libraries. Make sure the library drive is included the Time Machine backups. You get a desktop 3TB drive for less than $150.

You can plug in an external drive to the USB port of a TC and you've got your 2nd partition in no time.
It will just be painfully slow to do a real editing on a iPhoto library that resides on a network disk. Won't matter much, if you put it on TC internal or external drive - still slow.
However, the iTunes library can freely rest on a USB drive connected to TC.

I've never used my TC for anything other than backups...it's usually backing up 2 Macs, and although I know some folks partition them, it's not really ideal.

If I were the OP, I'd look fir a 2TB USB 3 external or similar....these are cheap now, and I have a WD that I use for storing stuff off Mac. The Time Capsule was never designed for anything other than backups, and I use it for that purpose only.

boltman519 said:

It's just being able to access the entire library from either of the computers.

Click to expand...

You just need to consider, that neither of these libraries are designed for concurrent access by multiple computers. So you must make sure yourself that the updates are occurringg in a serialized manner. That basically means library access for uptates shall be done in a mutually exclusive manner for the 2 computers.
Read-only access shouldn't theoretically be a problem, although I've never checked if it would work in practice.

I believe iTunes and iPhoto use some sort of a lock file to try to prevent concurrent access from two machines. However, I could well be wrong. The OP could test this by trying to open the library from two machines (but don't edit or write anything!).

What I really wanted to do was to remind the OP that if he places the libraries on a USB HDD plugged into the Time Capsule, these files will not, and cannot, be backed up by Time Machine. You must make other backups or risk losing them.

Also, the idea of keeping them on the mini but accessing them from the macbook also would work (just be sure to share the disk from the mini). The downside is the mini would have to be turned on when you wanted to access the libraries, but the good part is that TM could back them up normally to the Time Capsule.