Help Networking External Drive to work with Time Machine

I want to move photos, movies (home movies not DVDs) and iTunes library from my MacBook Pro to an external HD attached to the wifi router so I don't have to be hard wired to access photos, music, etc. while at home.

iTunes is ok to move the library..

I am not at all sure about photos library.. the previous iphoto had warnings against moving to a network drive.. so be prepared for trouble.. ie lots of backups. If by photos you mean raw photos and not a library then that is entirely different.

However in the apple world people almost inevitably are using an Apple App.

I want to continue using Time Machine to back up a) my laptop and b) the files moved to the external drive.

What do you use for target as your TM backup?

Let me tell you there is a huge problem with b. TM cannot backup network drives.. that means no matter where you move these files to.. TM cannot back them up.

My understanding is this is possible if the SECOND external drive is attached ONLY to an Apple 802.11ac Airport. No other wifi routers will work.

Two misunderstandings here.

1. You can use standard SMB share on any suitable router. Although using a sparsebundle or DMG file is better than using an network drive directly formatted NTFS or some such.. Files from the Mac can be stored on any network drive.. but using HFS+ is a requirement for some things.. photos for example may require it.

2. You cannot back up the files on network drives as I pointed out above.

3. Other NAS drives are available that do work with Mac and can store the files in native Mac format. Synology and QNAP are typical excellent quality NAS that easily handle Apple files.

Another solution is a Mac as file server.. it doesn't have to run Mac server OS.

Eg a Mac mini .. that is a better alternative. You don't need the latest but one from 2012 with USB3 port makes fast disk access cheaper and easier.

There are also other routers that will work.. not that I would recommend anything but an AE in this particular case.. but it is slow and I would prefer to see you thinking broader. If you have a netgear router some of these support Time Machine which also means they support Sparsebundle in HFS+ format. So exactly what model is it.

The Airport would be connected via ethernet to an existing Netgear wifi router that Comcast installed for the sake of handling our home security system.

Can this be done?

The actual setup of the Airport is trivial.. but you will need a rethink on backup. You may also need a rethink on using files actively from a network source.

Do I a) get a 2TB Time Capsule,

b) plug it in to the Netgear

c) load all my media onto it and

d) plug a 3TB drive into the Time Capsule to back up what's on it and my laptop?

Does that work?

A TC is same as AE..

You can do the same things.. It will work somewhat faster than USB generally.. but it still suffers the same problems.

It cannot be used by TM for backup source.. only target. You need to buy a backup software like Carbon Copy Cloner.

TC is a router (AE actually) with a hard disk inside .. there is no media extensions and no backup provision made except extremely slow full disk archive.

It is not going to be any more reliable than AE with external hard disk plugged into it.

a) upgrade my internal HD

Yes.. A 2011 MBP is highly upgradeable.. much more so than current machines..

Actually if it still runs ok I would buy an kit from OWC etc.. replace the DVD drive with a second hard disk.. buy a USB dvd if you ever use it.. most people seldom use them now.

Get largest SSD you can afford.. 250GB are not so expensive and the 500GB is IMHO well worth it..

If you have never used SSD before you will never want to go back to a spinning drive.. at least for boot.. HD are still much cheaper per GB for bulk storage.

And get a 1TB SSHD.. these are also cheap.. it is simply a hard disk with a much larger cache than normal.. 8GB or something like it.

This kind of setup is going to make it hard to give up the old laptop because the new ones are lot less flexible.

b) get a Time Capsule to handle the backups.

I would seriously look at a Mini.. if you want something to work as local storage and not just backup a mini could be ideal.. you can do TM backups to any network mac.. so that is simple. But you can also use it as HTPC and media server.

On the second hand market.. a suitable mini would probably cost about the same as the TC.. although you will need to buy a big USB drive for it.