I made a folder on TC and it is currently copying 930 photos to that folder. Two hours is the estimated time!
Yes, unfortunately copying/retrieving files from the TC is pretty slow, which makes it pretty mediocre as a general-purpose NAS or file server. For backups it doesn't matter much (they run unattended in the background) and for file recovery/disaster recovery it also doesn't matter much (because these events are rare), but for your usage it sure would be nice if it were faster. An external disk drive would be much faster.
So once it is done copying, I should be able to delete those photos from my MBA, correct? The risk is that if something were to happen to the TC, my photos would be lost. Also correct? I may decide to grab an external hard drive to have an extra copy just in case.
Once it's done copying, yes you
may delete those photos from your MBA, if you wish. You can always copy them back from the TC onto the MBA later, whenever you want.
And yes, the risk is that if the hard disk drive in the TC fails, you will lose all the photos you copied onto the TC disk. I think copying them to a new external drive would be better -- then the "main" copies would be on the external, and you can (and should) tell TM to back up the new external drive, so if it fails the TC will have backups and you'll not have lost them.
I almost think the TC may have been a waste of money in my case. Other than photos and music, I can't think of anything else stored on here that would cause a huge tragedy if I were to lose them. I mostly use this for web browsing.
Maybe, but I personally think it is worth backing up the entire system, and it's worth having an automated system for doing so (because people tend to be lazy and forgetful about boring things like backups). Even though the photos and music are the most important, there's likely to be other files you would miss if you lost everything. Bookmarks, email, notes? And you really need to back up the music and photos anyway, so you might as well back up the whole system (it doesn't take that much space). The SSD in your MBA could fail without warning. When you get a replacement put in, what do you do next? You could reinstall Mountain Lion, then spend time reinstalling every app you had and spend hours re-configuring settings and preferences. Or, you could just tell TM to restore everything from backup and your system will be restored to exactly the state it was for the last hourly backup. Very little time lost.
OTOH, if you don't agree and just bought the TC, I
think Apple will let you return it within 14 days(?) of purchase. Not sure, though.
The photos won't be deleted from the TC automatically once I deleted them from my MBA, right?
Right. Neither the Time Machine program nor the Time Capsule hardware will delete the photos you put there. TM does automatically delete old backups (in the .sparsebundle) but that won't affect the photos you put there. Only you or a disk crash would "delete" them.
Again, thank you very much for taking the time to help me.
You're very welcome!
