Timecapsule question

[troyhouse]

I have 2TB TC with my macbook pro and use for the backup regularly. I got one more TC, the newer version, as a gift and was thinking of using the old one as NAS, and the new one as TC for backup and wifi.

I also somehow want to backup the old TC used as a NAS so I don't lose data if it dies.

Any idea on how to make this work?

 

[Altemose]

@troyhouse Are you looking to archive the Time Capsule? If so, Apple includes a built in function in AirPort Utility where you can add a USB drive and clone the Time Capsule to it.

 

[Boyd01]

I tried using my 2tb Time capsule as a NAS for awhile, and it's really terrible for that. It's very slow - see this: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...-new-2013-time-capsule.1595589/#post-19406308

But the latency is an even bigger problem. The drives spin down just a few seconds after you access the disk, so they almost always need to spin up before any use, which takes several seconds. I tried using a utility program called "Keep Drives Spinning" (IIRC), it constantly writes a few bytes to the disk to keep it from sleeping. That sort of worked, but it's a kludge.

And as you have noted, backing up a Time Capsule is a hassle. I believe that archive function in AirPort Utility is extemely slow. See the thread I linked to above - adding an external USB drive to the time capsule results in REALLY slow performance. My solution was to use Carbon Copy Cloner to backup the Time Capsule to an external disk on a Mac. That is pretty awkward, and also slow.

I think the Time Capsule does a nice job for its intended purpose, constantly backing up your macs with Time Machine. Using it for other purposes is awkward at best.

 

[Brian33]

Even though I really like my Time Capsules (one 1st-gen and one latest-gen), I think Boyd01 is pretty much right; I hadn't thought about the latency/spin-down issue before. You CAN use it to store stuff, but whether it works well for you would depend a lot on how you used those files. It seems that files you access rarely, or continuously, would work out the best.

Here's another idea (sparked by your desire to back up your current Time Capsule: I believe that Time Machine can be set to back up to TWO destinations. It alternates between the two. Use both time capsules, and every other hour will be backed up to one of them, and the in-between hours backed up to the other. So the TM backup is basically backed up! (Well, almost -- not an exact copy, but only one hour's difference.)