Upgrade Time Capsule

Hi,

Is it possible to just simply connect an extra external Hard Drive to the Time Capsule & use that - e.g.: the internal TC hard drive for Time Machine Back Ups & the external one for all "any/other" stuff?

Bazzy!

 

Unless you are comfortable tinkering, I'd agree with prof. chaos, just add an external drive to the USB port.

However, if you are up for cracking open the case, I'd recommend:

1) Partition the 2TB (or better 3TB) hard drive into two, 1 for TM backups and 1 for media. Sounds like you don't need a lot of backup space but I'd go at least 1TB for TM and 2TB for media/file sharing. This provides some future proofing.

2) Get an inexpensive external USB drive, at least the size of the media partition, to connect to the TC. This provides a convenient backup location for you media data.

3) Using any reliable backup software (I prefer Chronosync w/archiving enabled), set you TC media partition to backup on regular interval to the external. If you are paranoid about your backups, you can set the TM partition to backup to the external as well (if there's adequate space).

Yes, you can limit the size of the TM sparse bundle if you are comfortable opening it with Disk Utility and changing the settings. As long as it at least the same size as your hard drive it shouldn't be a issue to TM. When I've done this in the past I usually provide at least 1.5x the size of the source. You just have to remember to repeat this anytime you have to restart a machine's TM backup from scratch or add a new machine to the TC location.

Come to think of it, from my experience the easiest way to reinit a corrupt backup or delete an old one is to format the TC drive. Manually deleting the sparse bundle just never seems to work for me. In that case you would not want to have to format your media drive. For that reason alone, I'd split the drive into partitions.

One thing, I've never used multiple partitions in a TC, so I don't know if the TC erase function will work on just one of the two internal partitions or across the entire physical drive. Maybe someone with that experience can chime in.