Time Capsule

Can I apologise in advance for my simple questions, I am still get to grips with Macs.


I am about to buy both a Time Capsule and a Mac Book Pro, my question relates to Time Capsules and how they work in relation to a MacBook.
Is the Time Capsule storage available to be used as an additional hard drive for the notebook or is it solely used for back up? For example, could one have the whole of their iTunes on the Time Capsule yet sill accessible from the Mac Book wirelessly?

Many thanks

As far as I know it's just a wireless hard drive that can be used with Time Machine. Or used for any purpose you want.

You'd have to partition the Time Capsule for what you want. So one partition would be solely for Time Machine backups and the other partition would be pretty much a normal external hard drive you can do anything want with. I have this set up with my USB external hard drive and it works just fine.

Yes, you can use it for both. My mac backsup to the TC as well as me storing other files out there to be shared with another computer.

You can indeed use the Time Capsule in the way you have suggested. I am using my TC to hold my iTunes library and other media that I want to access from my home network. Any machine on our network can access these files.

For backup purposes I have two hard drives attached to the TC via a hub. One has my Time Machine backups and the other has a backup of the filles on the Time Capsule.

Thank you for your replies, great information.

Slydude said:

YI am using my TC to hold my iTunes library and other media that I want to access from my home network. Any machine on our network can access these files.

Click to expand...

I have close to 290GB of music, another 100GB of video on my laptop, and who knows how much in photos (all on a 500GB HDD).

Is it possible to move all of my media to a network drive, delete this media from my laptop, and then recreate my iTunes library so that it always knows that the source files are on the network drive? I typically just sync playlists to my iPhone for when I'm out and about or travel

I'm looking for ways to downsize the amount of data on my laptop so that I can migrate to the new MB Air. HDD size has proven to be the limiting factor from moving forward as the max is currently 256GB on the new MBA

Yes. Just make that music folder on the networked drive and set the itunes music folder in itunes as the folder on the networked drive. And it'll work. Setting the "let itunes organise the music inside that itunes folder" option would be a good idea too.

yodabeesh said:

I have close to 290GB of music, another 100GB of video on my laptop, and who knows how much in photos (all on a 500GB HDD).

Click to expand...

I have not tried moving photos over as I don't have many yet. It should be possible to move them fairly easily. Retaining the library structure might take a bvit of planning. What program are you using to organize them?

@ the8thark thanks for picking up that answer about the iTunes library. You said it in fewer words than I usually do.