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.

Source: Flickr

Source: Flickr

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
AirPort Utility

Air­Port Utility

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!