Time Capsule and USB Hard drive problem! PLEASE HELP!

[willorrock]

Hi,

This is the situation;

I have a MBP and an external hard drive, the HD has all my music on it (120GB's worth) and is plugged into my MBP via USB.
I have just bought a Time Capsule 500GB.

What i want to do;

I would like to backup everything to the TC (from the MBP and the external HD) and 'throw away' the old external hard drive which previously had my music on.
However, I would also like to use Time Machine for everything apart from my music (basically use the TC as an external HD (so the save locations of all the music files are on the TC but i play them on iTunes thru the MBP) and use it as back up)

Hope that makes sense

Thanks

 

[yanathin]

I was actually just going to post this same question - I'm planning on getting a 500GB Time Capsule, but my hard drive on my MacBook that I'm backing up is 200GB in size. I'd like to use 200GB of the Time Capsule to do its magic, and I'd like to use the remaining 300GB to use as an external hard drive. Is this possible to do without breaking it open and partitioning the hard drive? Does it automatically use the rest as an external? I'd really like to know this before I purchase one - this is my main deciding factor. Thanks!

 

[shoulin333]

Time Capsule, as with any Time Machine backup is not someplace where you want to store actively used files....

What you are going to want to do, is use Time Capsule to do it's own thing on keeping copies of everything, and plug in your external HDD to the usb port on the back of it, this will allow you to share that hdd over the whole network.

You can then play those files remotely as long as you are on your home network

 

[yanathin]

What exactly is the difference? If anything it sounds less safe connecting another external hard drive. It just seems like a waste of space on the Time Capsule if I can't really utilize the extra space...

 

[skorpien]

How is it less safe? If the external hard drive fails, you can connect it to a Mac and try to recover some of the data. If the TC's hdd fails, you're either voiding your warranty by opening it up or sending it in to Apple. The TC was designed for backup. It's easy to fill it up with other storage, and then you'd be hooped for Time Machine disk space since it's not possible to partition the TC (well, not easily anyway). Not to mention if you need a faster, more reliable connection to the HDD, you can always plug it in directly to your Mac.

 

[monjones]

I am doing almost exactly what you describe - i have a mbp with 500gb TC. I created a folder on it and dumped my 100gb itunes folder on it and got rid of the external drive i was using before (but i keep the external drive in a drawer in case the TC fails, so i effectively have a backup of my music). the downside is that eventually time machine will fill the TC with backup after backup (there's no easy way to partition the TC drive), and i won't be able to put new music on there. when that happens, i may start using the external drive again, and plug that into the TC. but right now it works pretty well, although i seem to keep needing to tell itunes where to find the music folder as it keeps defaulting back to the MBP internal drive - it's annoying and i haven't figured out how to make it permanently set to the folder on the TC.

 

[willorrock]

I am doing almost exactly what you describe - i have a mbp with 500gb TC. I created a folder on it and dumped my 100gb itunes folder on it and got rid of the external drive i was using before (but i keep the external drive in a drawer in case the TC fails, so i effectively have a backup of my music). the downside is that eventually time machine will fill the TC with backup after backup (there's no easy way to partition the TC drive), and i won't be able to put new music on there. when that happens, i may start using the external drive again, and plug that into the TC. but right now it works pretty well, although i seem to keep needing to tell itunes where to find the music folder as it keeps defaulting back to the MBP internal drive - it's annoying and i haven't figured out how to make it permanently set to the folder on the TC.

Thanks,
How exactly do i access the folder system in the time capsule? (so i can simply drag and drop my music files and re-import them into iTunes under that file destination) if thats not possible, how did you do it?

 

[MacBass]

What exactly is the difference? If anything it sounds less safe connecting another external hard drive. It just seems like a waste of space on the Time Capsule if I can't really utilize the extra space...

It may seem like a waste of space, however, Time Machine continues to perform full backups until the disk is full.

Keep the extra external drive and back it up as well onto your TC.

 

[monjones]

Thanks,
How exactly do i access the folder system in the time capsule? (so i can simply drag and drop my music files and re-import them into iTunes under that file destination) if thats not possible, how did you do it?

This worked for me: open finder, then you will see "shared" on the left hand side. if it doesn't already show the time capsule, click on the arrow next to shared to show the time capsule below it. click on the time capsule and it will bring up a folder icon for the time capsule in the main window. open the folder. probably all you will see is the sparsebundle file for the time machine backups, but you should be able to create a new folder in that window. i just called the new folder "music". with the time capsule connected by ethernet (for higher speed just for the transfer) and the external drive connected by usb, i copied the itunes music folder on the external drive and pasted it into the new folder on the time capsule. it then copied over. then i disconnected the ethernet, went into itunes and changed the folder location for the music in options. as i said before, the folder seems to change back to the internal drive every now and again, but it works. resetting the folder location is easier than finding an external drive and having to plug it back in.

 

[orinoko1]

Time capsule - Partition for itunes

I have a 1TB TC. I used disk utility to partition to three drives named - TIME MACHINE (300Gb), DATA (410Gb), ITUNES (220Gb). That's correct - I've lost 70Gb somewhere in the process!!

system is 2gb Mac Mini with 160HD running 50" plasma

Problems
1. I cannot point Time Machine at the partition Drive, I now get an error saying not enough space exists for backup (I'm assuming this is the sparsebundle file - the missing 70Gb)
2. I had to delete my Itunes library from macdrive then reimport (7080) songs back into Itunes by setting partition drive as location (Itunes still puts the resource album art and associated files on macdrive not on TC.
3. Although connected by ethernet, the TC skips whilst playing tracks - far too slow to stream audio!!
4. Whenever I reboot or crash (which is a regular occurrence), the drive fails to mount, have to manually click open on sparse bundle.

Have I got it all wrong - can I use a 1TB TC for this purpose or have I bought a very expensive white box?

...Oh - forget about trying to use the TC with ethernet for EyeTv Archive - not a chance of this working effectively for video...