Dumping data to save disk space

My MacBook Pro has a 250GB drive and is almost full – about 50GB is music and 100GB is photos. I’ve been giving thought to how best to add external storage to my setup – to run Time Machine backups, but also to adjust my network setup so that my BT Home Hub 4.0 works purely as a modem and a Time Capsule runs the wireless network. I don’t know how to go about setting that up though!

I know Time Capsule will enable me to move things off my MacBook, but I had problems moving my iTunes library onto a wireless external drive in the past. I’d be grateful for advice regarding a similar setup using a Time Capsule or an alternative. David Bradford Adding a Time Capsule backup is an excellent idea, but it won’t solve the disk capacity problems on your MacBook Pro. Time Machine is a backup, not an archive and you certainly shouldn’t feel you can delete files from your hard disk just because they are backed up somewhere. You could configure the Time Capsule’s disk to use part for backups and the rest as networked storage, but this defeats the point of a backup because Time Capsule can’t back up its own drive.

I think you are making this much more complicated than it needs to be. Just get a Time Capsule to back up all your Macs and plug it into your router. There’s no real advantage in using it for Wi-Fi because your BT Home Hub is perfectly capable of handling that, and you’ll find it easier for BT to diagnose problems if you have a configuration it’s familiar with. Similarly, don’t bother moving your iTunes library if you don’t need to. 50GB isn’t that big a deal and you can free up plenty of space on the MacBook by moving your photo library, which is simpler. Move the photos to an external USB drive. That’s cheaper and easier to set up, and you can still back them up to the Time Capsule.