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.

• 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.