Time Capsule Questions about external backups

[Lincoln's Dad]

SO I currently have a TC that I use as a backup source, however I have recently been getting a message that tells me TC will purge old backups to make room for new ones. This is confusing to me as my macbook hard drive is only 160GB and I have a 500GB TC that has 210GB available. Any reason I am getting this message?

A second question is about storage. My macbook internal drive is getting full as I have a 1 year old son and taking more and more pictures everyday. I recently began shooting more in Raw format and the files are starting to take up more and more space fast. I would like to move these to an external hard drive to free up space on my macbook drive. My idea is to have this connected to the TC so I don't have to carry around the drive all the time on my lap. My fear is that this method is unsecure as this would be the only drive with the files. Is there a way, using some sort of software I guess, Time Machine would be ideal, to have 2 external drives connected to the TC, one for storage and another as a clone or mirrored drive so if the main fails I would still have a back up copy? If that sounds confusing I am sorry. I appreciate the help.

 

[MacForScience]

SO I currently have a TC that I use as a backup source, however I have recently been getting a message that tells me TC will purge old backups to make room for new ones. This is confusing to me as my macbook hard drive is only 160GB and I have a 500GB TC that has 210GB available. Any reason I am getting this message?

A second question is about storage. My macbook internal drive is getting full as I have a 1 year old son and taking more and more pictures everyday. I recently began shooting more in Raw format and the files are starting to take up more and more space fast. I would like to move these to an external hard drive to free up space on my macbook drive. My idea is to have this connected to the TC so I don't have to carry around the drive all the time on my lap. My fear is that this method is unsecure as this would be the only drive with the files. Is there a way, using some sort of software I guess, Time Machine would be ideal, to have 2 external drives connected to the TC, one for storage and another as a clone or mirrored drive so if the main fails I would still have a back up copy? If that sounds confusing I am sorry. I appreciate the help.

For the first question: do you only have one computer backing up to the drive? Time machine will periodically purge unused data from time machine according to the following scheme: Time Machine saves the hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for everything older than a month.

Second Question I found this confusing so let me know if I get this wrong.
Easiest way to solve your issue get an external RAID that is configured as a RAID 1 or Safe100. The you can backup an external drive using time machine but a RAID 1 will give you the same data redundancy. I would not try running a drive storing RAW images over a wireless network because of the large file sizes and the low bandwidth of a wireless network. You may want to consider a solution such as DROBO with a network attachment for a wired network.

Cheers

 

[Lincoln's Dad]

For the first question: do you only have one computer backing up to the drive? Time machine will periodically purge unused data from time machine according to the following scheme: Time Machine saves the hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for everything older than a month.

Yes only my macbook backs up to the Time Capsule, that's why I was confused with the message. Shouldn't I still have to use the remaining space before receiving the message?

Second Question I found this confusing so let me know if I get this wrong.
Easiest way to solve your issue get an external RAID that is configured as a RAID 1 or Safe100. The you can backup an external drive using time machine but a RAID 1 will give you the same data redundancy. I would not try running a drive storing RAW images over a wireless network because of the large file sizes and the low bandwidth of a wireless network. You may want to consider a solution such as DROBO with a network attachment for a wired network.

Cheers

Thank you. I have been looking at Raid Storage as well as the Drobo, but wasn't sure if that was what I needed. I was only thinking of using external drives as to keep the cost down. Drobo is upwards of $900 once you add the drives and I am not familiar enough with Raid systems to know what to look for. I guess I'll keep looking.

 

[MacForScience]

I would look at something like this if DROBO is out of your range.

http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=11471

Cheers

 

[hfg]

Do you have a virtual windows installation on your computer (parallels or VMware)? If so, be sure to "exclude" it from your backup or else TM will perform a backup of the entire windows VM each time it runs if windows is active. This will quickly fill up your backup drive, not to mention take a lot of time.

-howard