Time Capsule and Transfer Files

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Level 1

14 points

Time Capsule and Transfer Files

Hello, Here's what I'm up against and would appreciate any help.

I have the TC backing up my MacBook Pro. According to regular back-ups, its working. I also use it as my wireless router and haven't had a problem with connection. I've recently started to back up manually files to take them off my MacBook Pro harddrive to free up space, iTunes movies and such. Just today, it stopped backing these videos up. For example, the process will go for a 700MB video about 6 minutes. When I look in the time capsule, the name of the file is there, but under size of file it is zero and is not able to be opened.

Any help or ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks

Jeff

Posted on Jul 18, 2010 11:55 AM

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Answer 1

Jolly Giant

Level 7

25,464 points

Jul 18, 2010 12:33 PM in response to GreenBadger

GreenBadger wrote:
Any help or ideas would be appreciated.

time machine can't back up files that aren't on your startup disk (or any other disk connected to your computer and not excluded from backups).

thus, such files will eventually be deleted from the backup volume (e.g. your TC).

consequently, if you want to make room on your startup disk, use iTunes to move such files to an external HD connected directly to your Mac and make sure that external is not excluded from backups.

courtesy of *Chris CA* comes this tip on how to move selected content:

In iTunes 9.
iTunes prefs -> Advanced.
Set the iTunes media folder location to the external.
Then select the movie files (or any files in iTunes) and right click Consolidate.
This will copy only the movies to the external location.
After it finishes, iTunes prefs -> Advanced and set the iTunes media folder location back to the internal. This will tell iTunes to use the internal drive for new files.
You can then delete the movies from \Music\iTunes\ on the internal to free up space.
To copy a movie back to the internal, simply right click - Consolidate (since you pointed iTunes back to the internal).

just edit these instructions to meet your needs.

J GG

edited by the Jolly Green Giant (where Green stands for environmentally friendly)

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Answer 2

GreenBadger Author

Level 1

14 points

Jul 18, 2010 6:33 PM in response to Jolly Giant

Thanks for your message. I'm confused though still. I have used my time capsule as an external drive. Saving a photo or two to it, after making a folder on the time capsule, and saving the item in the folder. This is failing to work with the movies. Any other thoughts, or was I just lucky the first times and this isn't something the time capsule can do (work as an external drive that I can access from the mac)?

Thanks

JJS

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Answer 3

Jul 18, 2010 9:06 PM in response to GreenBadger

It will help if you think of the Time Capsule as a network drive, not an external drive although technically, I suppose it is. As you might imagine, with a name like Time Capsule, the product was specifically designed to work in conjunction with Time Machine for backups of your computer and any attached drives at your computer.

While it is possible to store files on the Time Capsule, you should not think of the product as a media server. It's not designed for that purpose and won't work well if you try to make it one. It's OK to store files on the disk, but you should not plan to access the files on a day to day basis or use the files as your primary database for iTunes, iPhoto, etc.

Bottom line...if you can think of anything on the Time Capsule as a backup, you'll minimize the chances of problems with the product.

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