Help setting up two Time Capsules

[dinahkay]

Hi! I originally posted this in another section, and I think it belongs here. I hope it is ok to post here:

Need help setting up Time Machine with 2 Time Capsules
I have the older square shaped Time Capsule, 2TB. We use the Time Capsule as our wifi router, but my iMac is connected via ethernet. Since moving to our new home we have been having progressively poorer and poorer wifi signal/strength in our two story home. I contacted Apple and my ISP. My internet speed is excellent when wired directly in to my mac (65 Mbps download speed.) When I test my wifi internet speeds via my iPad (sitting right next to my time capsule) the download speed is 32 Mbps. The issue arrises when I move to other parts of the house. My mac setup with the time capsule and cable modem is located in the upstairs corner of my home. I am getting download speeds of .20-.46 at times in my downstairs living room and my upstairs master bedroom. I should also note that there are 10+ wifi networks all in range of my home, included a Directv network for our satellite setup.

After speaking with Apple I purchased a Airport Express, which I placed downstairs, and I started getting 13-15Mbps readings in the living room. I am still getting the occasional <1Mbps, but not as often. None of this helps my master bedroom settings.

I decided to go buy an Airport Extreme today with the thought that maybe I just needed to upgrade my router. They were sold out, and I decided to buy a new Time Capsule 2TB. I figured for less than $100 more I would get additional storage, which is always needed since I am a photographer.

With all that here is my question....Is it possible to use my old Time Capsule to backup my iMac and use my new Time Capsule to backup my 2TB GDrive external hard drive using Time Machine? Currently, my total backup including my iMac and GDrive is too large of a backup for my old Time Capsule.

Here are my specs:
iMac (27-inch, Late 2013)
3.2 GHz Intel Core i5
24 GB 1600 MHz DDR3

Time Capsule (2013) 2TB
Airport Time Capsule 2TB
GDrive 2TB
Airport Express

Hopefully I provided everything you all need, and thank you in advance for your help!

-Dinah

 

[ColdCase]

So you have One Mac with two drives, one internal (? size) and one external (2TB)?

And you want to use time machine to backup to a Time capsule 2TB drive.

How long to you want deleted files to hang around on the backup in case you want to recover them, days, weeks, months (these take up space)?

You can do this, but if the sum of the files stored on the internal drive plus the files on the external exceeded 2TB the backup will fail. So if your internal and external drives are at 50% capacity, it'll work just fine, but there may eventually be a point where you run out of room.

What I would suggest is use timeMachine to backup the internal Mac drive to one Time Capsule and use Carbon Copy Cloner to backup the external drive to the other Time Capsule.... or attach a larger USB drive, say 3 or 4 TB, to the new Time capsule and backup the entire Mac (internal and external drives) to it.


You cannot take advantage of the storage of multiple time capsules and spread a TM backup over them. The destination needs to be a single volume (Disk or Raid array).

 

[eduardrw]

I would suggest to use the following scheme:
- 1st Time Capsule disks to backup your iMac via Time Machine
- 2nd Time Capsule disk "backup" iMac via Chronosync, CCC, or another 3rd party tool
- Two External disks attached to iMac directly to backup your GDrive 2TB drive using different tools as above. (different backup schedule)

This way you have 2 backups for everything, using 2 different methods - that is the minimum definition of backup!

You should have a 3rd backup offsite in case of theft, fire etc.