Can I expand a partition on my Time Capsule?

I have a 4TB Time Capsule

Apple never offered a 4 TB version of the Time Capsule, so your drive is really not 4 TB unless you physically replaced the existing drive in the Time Capsule with a bigger drive.

When I first set it up a few years ago, I created a 2GB partition for TM and a 2GB partition as a family shared drive.

The Time Capsule drive cannot be partitioned in a normal sense of the word unless it is removed from the Time Capsule and connected directly to your Mac using a USB to SATA converter or caddy. Then, you have to reinstall the drive back into the Time Capsule.

Or, if you purchased a new 4 TB drive, it would have been possible to partition it before it was installed in the Time Capsule.

What you might be saying is that you set up separate disk images on the Time Capsule hard drive, which in a way can act like a separate partition, even though it's not.

Time Machine normally wants to back up directly to the Time Capsule drive.....named "Data" by default unless you have changed the name of the drive....... and not to a disk image.......so you might have set up an disk image just for the "shared" data. If this is the case, then you could delete the disk image and the Time Capsule drive will revert to its maximum 3 TB size available for backups. Time Machine backups will continue without interruption.

If you set things up differently, then we need more details.

So, let's first get some clarification on the actual size of the drive in the Time Capsule and exactly "how" you partitioned the drive when you originally set it up.

In addition to Bob's comments, the "partition" used for Time Machine backups on a Time Capsule (TC) is actually three separate partitions (APconfig, APswap, and Datadisk). As such you cannot simply use the Disk Utility (or any third-party utility) to resize them.

If both Macs are backing up to the TC and another hard drive, then you might want to think about erasing the Time Capsule drive and starting over again with a new backup of each Mac moving forward. Despite what most users think, you would not use Disk Utility to erase the Time Capsule hard drive......you would use AirPort Utility. Post back if you need the steps for this.

Few of us ever need all the old backups from weeks, months and even years going back in time......and you have duplicate backups on other drives anyway.

Upside......you won't need to worry about running out of space for a long time.

Downside.....each new backup for each Mac will back up everything on the Mac, so it might take a few days to get the Macs backed up.

It's your call though. Good luck!

That's it -- two backup files and an empty folder "NetworkDrive".

Clearly NetworkDrive is not a backup.. so yes delete it if you can. If it can be deleted you will recover the space.

If not you will need to use command line with more permissions.

Is it a DMG file or a Sparsebundle if you happen to remember?

What amount of free space is showing in Airport Utility before and after the attempt to delete NetworkDrive? Does that match what is showing in Time Machine?

There is no trash bin in TC so it should delete the folder immediately.

Sorry, I'm confused. Your original post made no mention of an attached drive on the Time Capsule......it only mentioned that you created disk image(s) on the Time Capsule drive (named "Data" unless you have changed the name of the drive.

Forget about Disk Utility for now and quit the application.

Using the Finder, open the Time Capsule drive (named "Data" unless you have changed the name)

You should see a sparsebundle file there with the name of your Mac. This file contains the Time Machine backups that have been made from your Mac. If you are running Catalina, the file is now called a backupbundle.

If you have two Macs backing up to the Time Capsule using Time Machine, then there will be two sparsebundle or backupbundle files, etc. each with the name of the Mac that has been backing up.

The other disk image files file(s) will also appear.

Is this what you see?

Hopefully, you did not try to create disk images inside the Time Machine Backups file which is another file inside the sparsebundle or backupbundle file. That would be a real mess, which I have never tried, so I have no experience with this.

I have asked LaPastenague, a forum expert, to check this post and offer his comments. Stay tuned for his input.

my only downside to the full erase is that one of the existing laptop backupbundles has a fairly decent history that I'd hate to remove even though I acknowledge the need for it is slim

Using the Finder, you do have the option to delete the sparsebundle file of any individual Mac(s) that have been backing up. That way, you only delete the backups of a given Mac, not affecting any other backups of other Macs.

For example, if you had backups of 3 Macs on the Time Capsule and you want to keep one of them, you can delete the backups of the other 2 Macs.

It should be good to go. If the Mac has 100GB of data on its drive, after the first backup you will have about 250 GB of additional space for other backups. There is no way to allocate how much space each Mac will use on the Time Capsule drive........it's a first come, first served deal.

Power the TC off and back on again and see if the space still shows as 350GB.. that is too small for 4TB drive.

The biggest drive that Apple offered on the Time Capsule was 3 TB, although it is possible to install a larger drive. So far, this sounds like a standard 2 TB drive on the TC.