Can Time Capsule be set up as a second, local network?
Greetings! Before I give up and sell my Time Capsule, I thought I drop a line here – this is a long story! I bought the Time Capsule in 2011 (2T) for my office, initially to rout internet, backup two IMacs with Time Machine, work as a file server for archived projects and share a printer in the network , which was all easy to set up and worked great. Recently though, I had to give up my own internet connection to join a shared network in a shared office environment, including printer. The router is locked up in an another room and I cannot connect our TC directly to it. The router is not Apple and there is no Airport in this network, so I cannot extend it. So what I did was to change the settings from "create a network " to "join an existing network", which was also set up without problems. But, it's a disaster! Time machine backups are extremelly slow, blocks the entire network and mostly fails. The access to the files in the "data" disk is also extremely slow and difficult, the printer lags, with the result that I had to shut down Time Machine on both Macs.
Now I thought of further two solutions:
1. Set up the TC again to create a network but without connecting to the internet (as I am not able to connect to the router). Big Con: The Macs cannot be set to access two networks at the same time, so either manually back up and access files or be in the office network and use the internet. Fail!
2. Connect the TC directly as an external HD to one computer via Ethernet, but I heard this is no good at all, as the TC is not conceived to be used as an external driver. The local printer can be hooked to one Mac and be shared etc and we have another printer in the big network, so this not a big problem. But what should I do with the second Mac Time Machine? Fail!
I am seriously thinking about selling the TC and buying each Mac a usb-hdd for backups and forget totally about the local networking issue.
I'm so sad because this is not ideal. Any oder ideas or solutions?
TC 2T (2011)