Agreed, whole-heartedly. I’ve actually got about 73 GB of music in my itunes library–that’s half my disk. I couldn’t bear to part with any of it. It’s a problem. At any given time, I have about 6 GB free.

I find myself manually doing this and agree it would be helpful for a real solution. I end up keeping the stuff that I don’t use much on the desktop and add what i want to listen/view more often to the laptop. Usually ends up with me not having everything I want or need at the time I need it. I’ve also lost some files in the movement.

Someone could probably hack together a location aware mount point with a cron job that moves things between them if it’s mounted. A more elegant/transparent solution would be welcome. They have the appliance now so I wouldn’t be surprised if the next osx has something that uses it.

Well, I’m still waiting on time capsule to ship, but it seems like time macine will pretty much do what you say. It will back up old data, and you can go back and look it up later. It might be a workaround, you’d have to figure out a way to wrangle it, but imagining previous versions of your computer as folders doesn’t seem too far-fetched to me. It’s probably a workaround.

I do get what you’re saying, but it doesn’t seem as awkward as you’re saying. Maybe if you start using time machine to do all your storage… load pictures, let them back up, then delete them, you’d have a chronologically organized backup for pictures.

Or, maybe I’m just talking out of my @ss. When I have the time capsule here, I’ll be able to play with time machine more, and say for certain. But it seems to me that the chronologically organized whole system backup is a slightly different paradigm than I’m used to, and I have a feeling that it will start to change the way system backups are viewed. It will probably be less of a crash repair fix, and more of a way to organize the things in a similar fashion to what you describe.

My biggest problem is trying to organize piles and piles of old sh!t in a way where I can find what I’m looking for. Now that people have information backed up dating back to pre- int’net listserv days, there’s a lot of stuff to look through, and I don’t have the patience to look through that many folders. Chronological order is a good starting point for me, particularly for pictures.

But again, I could just be spouting out of my backside.

@James: unfortunately, anybody who tries to do this with Time Capsule or Time Machine will get a nasty surprise: lost data. When a drive fills up, Time Machine deletes the oldest backups to make room for the new backups. A feature I’d love to see is one that allows users to burn backups to DVD for archiving.

Your point about organization is huge, however. And that’s why I find it so difficult to archive photos out of iPhoto. I’ve learned how to find my photos there, but DVD archives break that.

Hi guys,

Just wanna share my experience. I love taking photos too and have quite a huge photo libraries: iPhoto and Aperture. Yes, for the photos, I suggest you try Aperture which enables you to manage referenced files you keep on an external drive or wherever you store them. And in my iPhoto library, I just keep some smaller size pics and frequently used ones. In my 80GB external hard disk, I keep the photos mostly be my Nikon D80 (each raw file sizes almost 10 MB), and my two other iTunes library. Yes, my 80GB internal hard disk is to small to accommodate all of them. It’s too costly to upgrade internal HDD. So, I am doing ok with the above solution. And I am currently using my 120 GB external harddisk for Time Machine.

So, in short, use Aperture for better management of your photos and split iTunes libraries.

I can’t wait to get Time Capsule.

Cheers.

“I’ve also tried burning photos of to CD or DVD, but that defeats the point of having a library in the first place.”
I don’t get it. I do this all the time, and I have an index on the dvd of what photos are there, and when I need to share them I pop in the disk, download what I need, and send them on their way.
My 80 gig G4 lampmac has had 30 gigs in the clear since I got it.
What IS the point of a library?

@Charley Eastman: I’m glad you’ve found a solution that works for you. I’ve tried what you suggest and found a few reasons why it doesn’t work for me:

• I travel a lot so I often don’t have physical access to my backup media.
• I’m pretty good at keeping my discs clean and scratch free, but I occasionally get errors when trying to read old discs, this is very scary.
• Have a small home and don’t have much room to store these discs
• I recently moved and now can’t find a box of previously backed up stuff. Also very scary.

I may be at the extreme end of the market, but this seems like a wide open space for somebody to fill. Think of the features: it makes hard drive capacity elastic, it backs up the entire contents of the hard drive, it makes it possible for remote access to the entire contents of the hard drive.

Yes! I totally need this. The problem with iPhoto is I like to make minor edits to lots of old pictures when I come across them, and with the 10’s of thousands of pics I have, my 40 GB of photos is now 80 GB.

In the meantime, I plan on using Aperture instead of iPhoto, to reference my photo collection on an Airdisk behind the TimeCapsule. It keeps lower resolution previews on your laptop so you always have them to look at without the file size bulk, and if you need the full resolution shot you can pull it off the external disk temporarily to edit/export.

This should be included in iPhoto though… they make it too easy for you to spend a lot of money.

Completely agree that this is just a software issue. I can’t decide what to get rid of so I don’t. I want software to decide and keep in a user defined location indefinitely. Problem with Time capsule of course is that it is intended to be a back-up if it is an archive then the archive needs backing up. Raid array calling…..

Isn’t being able to browse another machine (using .Mac) one of the features of 10.5? I wouldn’t suggest trying to stream music, but you could keep most (all?) of your pictures on the machine at home, and still have full access to everything while traveling. SLOW access, but that’s better than no access.

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I’ve been able to store my iPhoto Library and my iTunes library on my TIme Capsule and it works great. If you open up the time capsule in the finder, you’l find a folder called “data.” There, you can place your libraries and then tell iTunes where it is. With iPhoto, you hold down the option key while it’s starting up and it asks you where the library is - navigate to the folder on your time capsule. It might be a little slow with iPhoto as it has to receive the data wirelessly, but it’s a great solution to clearing off space from your hard drive and any computer on the network can access the pics and music. I THINK there’s a way to access the iPhoto library remotely, but I haven’t figured that out yet…

@Nick: The main issue I see with your solution is that your libraries are not Time Machined anymore … so if ever your TC implodes (may happen …), you loose everything, unless you manually backup everything on a regular basis.