New Time capsule as photo database

[FandangoUK]

I would like to use a time capsule with Lightroom for photography and be able to use as a conventional wired hard drive and wireless drive.

Can a external hard drive or macbook be connected to the time capsule though USB? I want to be able to back up thousands >1TB photos to time capsule and then have them available to access wirelessly. To do this over wireless originally would take forever and also exceed broadband allowance by a massive amount.

I also want to back up the time capsule to another conventional hard drive on a regular basis on a wired usb connection. Is this possible?

Will it also recognise subsequent data transferred to the time capsule through wireless means and then just update relevant folders originally transferred through the wired connection?

 

[Ifti]

You won't be ale to backup the TC disc, as that is supposed to be the actual backup drive in the first instance.

It sounds to me like a NAS would be a better solution for your photography uses.

 

[meistervu]

I was looking to do exactly what described. However, I know of any NAS that allow you to connect directly to a computer with a USB cable.

I use Aperture, and used to have Lightroom. For the purpose of this discussion, they are similar. There are people on this forum who store library on a fast NAS and connect to it via a wired Gigabit Ethernet connection and are happy with the performance. I guess the only way for me to find out is try.

But then, I look at the complexity and cost of a NAS plus a back up solution to go along with that, and my needs which is about 2-3TB of storage space accessing from a single computer, a DAS (Desktop Attached Storage) makes more sense. The best I have found so far is a Buffalo Station DDR 3TB for just about the price of a typical external drive, but is many times faster than a NAS or any other DAS for that matter. Pair this with a Time Capsule (perhaps replacing the internal drive with a 4TB in the future and I am set. This is much cheaper than a NAS and a backup solution especially if you consider the wireless router function of the Time Capsule which is about $200 if you get a comparable AC router.

But what about accessing the photos on the network? Well, my solution doesn't work unless I leave my MBP running. One thing I could do is publishing a jpeg version of each photo to the Time Capsule. Here is a link to one posting with instruction on how to use a TC as a iTunes library:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4032665?start=0&tstart=0

If that works for you, the above solution has many advantages:

1. simple - no complicated RAID, NAS, fewer things to go wrong
2. cheap - the storage space is not much more than the cost of a hd
3. fast - the Buffalo Station DDR is the fastest DAS out there, unless you pay for SSD.