Time Capsule and Windows

It is now over 24 hours since I have purchased my Time Capsule, and now that I have all three of my Macs backing up to it, I am much more of a happy camper. Each computer is doing their appropriate backups at the time they are supposed to on cue.

What I wanted to focus on here is the usability of a Time Capsule with Windows. In a word, simple. The drive is easily available under it's appropriate share name and the same for the share folder under that drive. You see all the files that Time Machine is using to backup the files and what not. From the root level, you can create a new folder or multiple folders in case you wanted to start backing stuff up from your Windows box as well.

One word of warning though, DO NOT open any of the Time Machine backup folders in Windows [side note, they appear as folders in Windows, but on the Mac they are actually the drive image system that Time Machine cleverly uses to store stuff], it will cause issues. For some reason, they are very picky and do not like to be touched. If you do, you may suffer the consequences and receive an error like this:

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This high level error doesn't tell you much about why it cannot mount the volume. When I first came across this, I tried numerous things like rebooting my computer and the like. I tried deleting the backup that was there for my system and it wouldn't let me because the "banks" folder was in use. Turns out, this was one of the folders that I had opened on my Windows box.

I went over to my Windows machine, and didn't notice any applications or Explorer using the folder, so I wasn't sure what to do. Then I rebooted the Time Capsule hoping it would remove anything that was "connected" to it and I was then able to delete the backup and re-start my desktop process.

If you read anything in this post read this: DO NOT TOUCH YOUR BACKUP FOLDERS FROM TIME MACHINE WITHIN WINDOWS!