Reader question: Can you store other files on the Time Capsule?

The new Time Capsule peripheral is an interesting beast: an Airport Extreme with a Frankenstein complex, with an onboard drive for backup storage. What else can you do with that space? According to Apple reps at the booth, the drive appears just as a wireless disk would appear with the original AE base, so you can in fact put other data on there besides the Time Machine backups. Since TM backups tend to grow to consume all available space, partitioning the Time Capsule drive might be a good idea if you can do it in advance. We'll try to get hands-on with the Time Capsule utility later today to verify that you can split it up.

As the Time Capsule is otherwise identical to an Airport base, you can hang printers or USB drives off the unit and share those as you would with the older gear.

Update: A further conversation at the Apple booth leads me to believe that you will not be able to partition the drive on the Time Capsule. If your purchase decisions are contingent on this capability, please wait until I can get a solid answer from the product manager at Apple on this. You could conceivably 'reserve' space on the TC by creating a disk image to hold your files, but I wouldn't recommend that unless you absolutely have to do it. A couple of contrary reports are saying that you cannot store other files on the TC drive, but everyone I've talked to says that it does mount as a regular wireless disk and you can write to it if needed.

Some other concerns:

"Can I connect the Time Capsule as an external USB drive, directly to my Mac?" No, that functionality isn't in the Airport Extreme and I wouldn't expect it to be in the TC -- however, with gigabit Ethernet you can transfer data faster than USB anyway. Note that I said AS a USB drive, not TO a USB drive -- the Airport feature of external drives connected to the TC is still there, but the external drives aren't valid backup targets.

"Can I stream directly from a Time Capsule to my Apple TV?" Probably not; while you can store an iTunes library on a wireless disk, you still need iTunes to mediate between the storage and the Apple TV.

"If the Time Capsule is the same as an Airport, when will Apple enable Time Machine backups to external USB disks via the Airport?" Could be never. It's been suggested by some (including some of our own) that the combination of the wireless bridge and the USB storage bridge is simply too latency-prone and laggy to provide the needed performance for Time Machine, and that the SATA internal on the Time Capsule is integrated and speedier to allow TM to behave as expected. With no SATA bridge on the Airport Extreme, and no forecast on a fix for the write caching issues, don't count on official support for wireless backups via that hardware.

"Can I use USB wireless networking devices (Sprint or Verizon EVDO) as broadband connections for Time Capsule?" Nope, not directly connected to the TC -- not a feature of the Airport.

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Source: http://www.apple.com/timecapsule/

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The new Time Capsule peripheral is an interesting beast: an Airport Extreme with a Frankenstein complex, with an onboard drive for backup...

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Marina

Why is it that these devices won't control a USB scanner? That way all peripherals are shared between all computers on the network.

January 24 2008 at 7:17 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Cintra

I'm waiting for the partitioning answer before ordering one, and I also came across this post which made me think: arjunthomas.com/?p=309
Note created January 18, 2008 1/18/08

"Time Capsule ... Downside:
Unlike many of the pricier networked attached storage devices out there, Time Capsule appears to be a single drive product, which means no expanding the storage capacity with another drive. Fair enough, given the price, but weâ€™re unclear as to whether youâ€™ll be able to replace the single hard drive yourself, easily or otherwise. The Time Capsule product page on Appleâ€™s Web site doesnâ€™t suggest that itâ€™s possible. We imagine many people would find that inability a major shortcoming, because if the drive fails and you need to take it to an Apple Store for repair, you not only lose backup capability, but your wireless network goes down as well.

January 18 2008 at 5:55 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Long Duck

A big question regards the full functionality of the USB ports. Can one plug a multifunction printer in and use all the features as if one plugged it straight into the Mac?

The inability to use the scanner wirelessly has made the AEBS problematic for small businesses as MF printers are starting to dominate sales. Apple used to be a leader in printers and printer functionality. Now that Apple no longer is in the printer biz, this is turning into a weak spot for the platform.

January 17 2008 at 6:26 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

akira

Bums. I don't wan to spend 500 bucks on a product that should have been a functionality that was promised in leopard. What a kick in the balls, apple style

January 17 2008 at 2:08 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Dethpickle

How about transfer speed? The second to last paragaph seem to hint this was faster than the AirDisks...
I've always been very dissapointed in the speed that I transfer at with my USB off the Extreme. Its fast enough to keep my iTunes library there and still stream, but for file service its way too slow.
Why is it so much slower than file sharing with another computer over WiFi? Any reason to think that the Time Capsule might be faster - approaching speeds of sharing with another computer? I would want want just as a NAS disk...

Thanks!

January 17 2008 at 12:58 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

paul

When will Apple wake up and let us limit how far the backups go? I don't want 500 gigs of space slowly being wasted on ancient backups I'll never need.

January 17 2008 at 12:30 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

kemck

Ok let me ask this...If I get a TC and hang another drive off of the USB port... what shows up on the desktop? Will I be able to transfer files from TC to the other USB connected disk? Right now Air Disk doesn't work under Leapord and the only way to access the drive attached to my .n Airport is via Finder / Share.....

Can someone clear this up?

January 17 2008 at 12:21 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Patrick Cheung

I bet it (TC and AEBS) doesn't create spotlight index of the Airdisk, but does it return anything if I enter a keyword in the Finder "Shared" search? Is it incredibly slow?

January 17 2008 at 12:03 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

enzogeo

Question:

TC is a wireless network router and storage drive. I don't want to run the disk drive all day - all night - just when i use my mac(s) and turn off the drive (sleep / off) when I say so.

Think about it - why would you want to broadcast your personal information - banking, ssn, family data - all the time behind a fire wall / wep2 --- all it takes is some super happy nut to crack one TC and start using that method for all TCs. Plus the mtf is lower if you run your disk 24h a day.

Thus my question - is there a way to turn off the disk and run the hub ?

Thanks,

V

January 17 2008 at 12:02 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

p00pers

http://www.apple.com/timecapsule/wireless.html
"Works with Mac and PC.
Time Capsule with Time Machine in Leopard is the ideal backup solution. But that doesnâ€™t mean Tiger, Windows XP, and Windows Vista users canâ€™t enjoy the benefits of Time Capsule, too. Because it mounts as a wireless hard drive, Tiger and Windows users simply access Time Capsule directly from the wireless network for exchanging and storing files quickly and easily."
so, does this mean I have to get a computer with tiger or use bootcamp to get into XP/Vista to use this as a 1 TB NAS?

January 17 2008 at 8:44 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply