Max Beatty

What do you get when you cross a Macbook Pro with a 500 GB hard drive with a 500 GB Time Capsule? A slim margin for back ups. I knew this day was going to come when I upgraded from my old Macbook that just had a 60 GB hard drive. Now, I have the daunting task of figuring out what to do now that what I want and need to backup is too big for my backup media.

Before I continue, I will say once again that Mac OS X’s Time Machine with Apple’s Time Capsule is the easiest and most thorough backup solution around. Set and forget it. Never worry again about anything. I love it and highly recommend it to everyone I know (and those I don’t). When I got my new Macbook Pro, instead of having to spend a day or two configuring settings and installing new software I was able to just plug it into my Time Capsule and tell it I want it just like my Macbook and in a little over an hour I had an exact clone. It was a real time saver!

On to the problem at hand, what happens when Time Machine can’t back up anymore because there isn’t enough space on your Time Capsule? I called Apple Support for ideas and of course their first answer was to buy a bigger Time Capsule. The 1 TB model would suffice and the 2 TB model would probably be best, but I don’t have an extra $300 – $500 at the moment to buy another one.

The other solution was to erase my current Time Capsule and create a fresh full backup. This would erase months of backups which means I wouldn’t be able to restore to previous versions of files or recover files I had accidentally deleted. I was comfortable enough to do this so I took the following steps:

1. Turn off Time Machine in System Preferences
2. Open Airport Utility and select your Time Capsule from the list of devices on the left
3. Click “Manual Setup” and then the “Disks” tab at the top
4. Click “Erase…” and choose which level of security you want

I chose the quick erase option since I was going to be putting the exact same sensitive information back on the hard drive. This also is the quickest method so you can get to the next step. After it has been erased, connect your Mac to your Time Capsule with an ethernet cable if you’ve been doing this wirelessly thus far.

WARNING: Performing a full backup over WIFI will literally take DAYS

Once they’re connected via ethernet, go turn Time Machine back on in System Preferences and select your disk once again as the backup destination. This first full backup will still take a few hours when you’re connected via ethernet so you might want to leave it running overnight.

That solution is really just a “bandaid” and won’t last long term. Sooner or later, I’m going to need a bigger external hard drive. It doesn’t have to be another Time Capsule, but it’ll be easiest if it is. So what do you do with your old Time Capsule?

• Use it to backup another Mac with a smaller hard drive and expand your home network range
• Use it as a network storage drive for media, etc. and expand your home network range
• Sell it to a close friend or someone who isn’t very tech savvy

Why do I say that? Even if you use the most secure erasing methods, your data is really never gone. If you think about what Time Machine is doing, it’s not just keeping every single file that has been on your Mac but also the different versions you’ve had of it. If you’re one of those naughty children who keep a text file named “passwords” on your desktop with all of your passwords in it, someone could not only recover what your most recent passwords are but look back at what different passwords you’ve used in the past. From there, they could look for patterns in your passwords and maybe even guess future passwords.

If you noticed in my screenshot, we have tons of other Apple products spread around our house that makes our WIFI network awesome. When you’ve outgrown your current Time Capsule, turn it into a media server to store all those pictures and videos that are accumulating from weekends and vacations. I’ll probably dedicate mine to all the HD video my Mino Flip HD camera takes so I don’t have to worry about filling up another hard drive.

For you hardware hackers out there that probably thought this was going to be a post about cracking open your Time Capsule to throw in a much bigger hard drive, it has been done already. My only warning is that when I took my TC in to the Apple Store to check an ethernet port, the Genius technician told me that if you try to pop open your TC to change the drive you’ll probably break it completely. Apple doesn’t want you in there so they’ve designed them accordingly. That’s my only word of caution from the horse’s mouth.

Backup, backup, and backup again!