Time Machine, Time Capsule and backups
I've been using our Time Capsule (TC) to act as both wifi router and backup device. This has worked well for quite some time but managing the backups on the TC can be confusing. The 2tb TC has been backing up 3 Macs for us for more than a year and is nearly full. Time Machine (TM) on each of the Macs manages it's own backups by deleting old backups but when I tried to add my new MacBook Pro (MBP) there was not enough space remaining on the TC to perform the first backup. I don't think that one TM can delete/manage another TMs backups so I was not sure how best to handle this situation. Rather than wiping the TC and starting over with it I decided to repurpose a 1tb WD MyBook to act as a local time machine backup disk for my MBP. Doing this has a number of advantages that I'm beginning to appreciate including being much quicker (than via wifi) and doing full backups with no exclusions (to reduce usage of backup device space) so that a full restore is possible. I'll try this method for a while and post when I have a few more observations.