One of the first tools I set up when I first purchased my iMac was Time Machine. I had a spare TB drive from my old computer so I ended up inserting it into an external drive enclosure and using that as my Time Machine disk. So far Time Machine has saved me a number of times, so I figured I would give a little back and invest in a Time Capsule. I was certainly looking forward to being able to backup both my iMac and my new MacBook Pro, especially since I was relying on my sporadic manual backups in regards to my MBP. I was a bit taken aback when I read that you couldn’t partition Time Capsule’s drive over the network, so I decided that the only logical solution would be to immediately take apart this work of art and partition it across USB.
Since I still had my old external drive enclosure it was just a matter of swapping out the drives and hoping for the best. To get at the drive within the Time Capsule you’ll need to remove the grey rubber bottom. It’s held on by some light adhesive, enough adhesive to hold when you go to put it back on – assuming enough care is taken to not contaminate the adhesive surface. Once you get the rubber bottom off it’s just a matter of removing the ten small philips screws holding the metal base on. Once the screws are removed you should be able to easily lift the metal plate and carefully unhook the small cable running to the fan attached to the corner of the plate.
Once you remove the rubber bottom and metal plate, the drive is immediately accessible near the bottom of the Time Capsule. The drive isn’t actually attached to the Time Capsule, it’s just free floating within a metal cage. Carefully lift the end of the drive out to where you can easily pull the SATA data and power cables out and then lift the drive out of the encasing cage. Once free, just hook it up to a device that will allow you to attach it to your Mac through USB or firewire. I was able to just pull the circuit board out of my external drive enclosure and hook up the SATA data and power cables to the newly freed hard drive. After connecting the drive to my Mac it immediately shows up in Disk Utility with the option to partition it.
This is where it got a little bumpy for me. I wanted three partitions: a 500GB partition for my iMac’s Time Machine backups, a 300GB partition for my MacBook’s Time Machine backups, and a third 130GB partition for storage and easy sharing between the Macs.
Using Disk Utility to partition the Time Capsule into three data partitions
You’ll immediately see three partitions on your disk: APconfig, APswap, and Data. The first two are scary looking and I imagine are used by the OS on the Time Capsule, so I steered clear of them. The third partition is a bit more welcoming and it’s where you would have stored your Time Machine backups had you not gone on this partitioning spree of yours. I resized this partition down to the 500GB I wanted for my iMac and then created an additional two for the MacBook and storage partitions. After clicking the Apply button everything seemed to be going well until Disk Utility threw an error saying the partition failed with the error “Filesystem verify or repair failed”. Immediate thoughts of wondering if popping the lid off this guy voided my warranty flooded my head, but I pushed them away as I Google’d the error. After scanning a few articles, I ran a repair on the disk and tried again. We got a bit farther in the process this time, but Disk Utility ended up completely crashing while formatting the partitions. I had to go in and remove the two added partitions, run a repair again, and then create the partitions again. As it turns out, the third time is the charm.
Once completed, I ejected the disk and disconnected it from my external hard drive enclosure and then placed it back into the Time Capsule. After powering on, I was able to see all three partitions from both my iMac and my MacBook. It was a beautiful sight. As I type this my MacBook is making it’s first ever Time Machine backup to it’s partition while I’m copying over some files to the storage directory on my iMac. It seems to be a solid solution so we’ll see where it goes from here.