New Present (Time Capsule) - Now What Can I Use It For :-)

Hi,

I've just received a time capsule from my girlfriend for Christmas, and i have a few questions.

01 - i had to disable time machine on my MBA last year as i was running out of space. I now have 35GB left on my 256GB hard drive... will this be enough to run Time Machine with the Time Capsule, or do they need to work together at all?

02 - what else can the Time Capsule be used for, other than backing up your data... is there any known tricks or hacks?

Thanks in advance for your help.

You did not have to disable Time Machine, unless you were somehow using Time Machine on the boot drive of the machine you were meant to be backing up. When you use Time Machine with an external drive, it automatically prunes the oldest backups when it starts to run out of space, thus continually freeing up space for future backups.

The Time Capsule works exactly the same way.

I note that you say you're down to less than 20 percent free space on your boot drive -- I'd suggest you do some pruning, OS X (and many programs that run on it) work best with a lot of free space.

As for other uses for a Time Capsule, it is of course also a 802.11ac dual-band router as well as a backup drive. Should you decide you don't need all 1TB (or 2TB, don't know which version you got) for backup purposes, you can partition it and use the second partition for some other kind of data storage. It's a fabulous router, I would suggest using it to replace your present router as it likely has more capability and speed (though to some extent that will depend on your Internet connection).

@ OP - well, Chas_m has provided a succinct explanation of the Time Capsule (I'm using an Apple Extreme router w/o built-in storage) - but, you likely already have a 'home' network w/ another Wi-Fi router - correct?

If so and if you are not 'network savvy', then you might want to explain your current computer/network arrangement so the Time Capsule can be integrated correctly and efficiently. Dave

'Tis better to give than receive' ~ so mail it to me and save all this hassle!

That's quite a bit of postage for you Harry. Might cost a bit. In the spirit of Christmas 'd like to suggest the OP save a few bucks bt by sending it to me instead.

Thanks guys, much appreciated ;-)