macOS Sierra 10.12.3. iMac 27-inch late 2012, 2.9. GHz Intel Core i5. 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3. Airport Utility 6.3.7 (637.5).
The system notified me that the schedule backup could not occur. How can I erase older backups to clear up space on the device?
iMac, macOS Sierra (10.12.3)
any AirPort Extreme with a hard drive attached functions just like a Time Capsule
Not quite. Even if you use the current version of the AirPort Extreme......which is the only version that Apple officially supports for Time Machine backups.......you may have forgotten that the AirPort Extreme USB port is old and slow USB 2.0.....and....that the processor inside the AirPort Extreme further limits the speed of data going to the USB drive to about one-half of normal USB 2.0 speeds. Not too impressive.
So, while the AirPort Extreme / USB Drive setup might function "just like a Time Capsule", it will do so at about half the speed of backups that go directly to the drive on a Time Capsule.
A variant....and better choice......of Option 2 would be to add a USB drive to the Time Capsule and use the Archive function in AirPort Utility to copy all of the data on the Time Capsule drive over to the USB drive. Then, erase the Time Capsule drive and start over again with a new backup. This is a more complicated process, but it is a better performance option.....if performance is important to you.
Not recommended to try to manually erase older individual backups since this can easily corrupt the entire backup file. Basically, you have 3 options.....listed in order of most expensive on down.
1) Add a new Time Capsule and start backups going there
2) Add a USB drive to the Time Capsule and start backups going there
3) Erase the hard drive on the Time Capsule and start over again with backups. The downside here is that you lose your old backups, which may or may not be an issue for you.
I much prefer Option 2. You can attach all sorts of high-capacity drives or arrays to the Time Capsule at a much lower cost than upgrading the Time Capsule itself. In the Time Capsule Apple uses 2.5-in laptop drives, which have a considerable higher cost per gigabyte than the standard 3.5-in drives and are not even available at the very high capacities of 4 GB and beyond.
For that matter any AirPort Extreme with a hard drive attached functions just like a Time Capsule.
In the Time Capsule Apple uses 2.5-in laptop drives,
Actually no. The TC has always been 3.5" drives since they were introduced.
See the strip-down of the latest one.
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/AirPort+Time+Capsule+A1470+%28Mini%21%29+Teardow n/15067
But you can see earlier ones also used 3.5" drives. The site has several different Gen TC and all of them have standard desktop drives. Apple even used the "server drive" as part of the advertising but the only TC that ever got an actual server drive was Gen1 and they died from power supply overheating .. fast.. 18months on average.. so the better drive was useless.. since then they use Green Drives or low power ones as they are adequately fast and lower power consumption with less heat.
any AirPort Extreme with a hard drive attached functions just like a Time Capsule
Apple supports only the AC model to do this. Although many people used earlier ones it was not reliable for many people.
My Time Capsule has too little space for normal backup. How do I erase older backups to free up space?
