Tong Family

Classic user error, I just deleted my entire photo directory from my time capsule. This is a real problem because there is no way to recover it without opening the Time Capsule and voiding your warranty. Also there are no permissions, so you can’t secure a folder to prevent this kind of thing. So it means that you need to (and I don’t) be religious about doing an archive to another drive that is USB connected. Of course, this is completely manual and the problem is that if your drive is nearly full, you need 1TB drive to get one full imagle and it takes the whole Time Capsule down too. So be careful!

As an aside, the top hit for file recovery for macs is Disk Warrior. Don’t Get This! The site says over and over, it recovers files. But this is only if the directory is bad, it actually doesn’t recover deleted files (which you’d expect). And they won’t refund you $100. So you need it only in the limited case that your directories are corrupting.

The product that works great is Data Rescue which searches the empty sectors looking for files. I will have thousands of strangely named files, but that isn’t as bad as losing 100GB of photos!

AppleInsider | Answers to Time Capsule reader questions

Yes, in addition to setting up a single password for all users, both Time Capsule and AirPort Extreme allow you to define a list of users, and assign each read only or full read and write permissions. However, there is no more granular controls to set up drop box (write only) permissions or to define different permissions on different volumes, files, folders or drives.