Can a Time Capsule be partitioned? Is having a HD mirror the contents of the TC a good safeguard for potential HD/TC failure?

Question

I have a few questions about the Time Capsule
I am going to use a 2TB time capsule to do wireless backups of my Macbook, but also manually store files (photos, movies, music etc). Can I partition the TC? I want to have maximum storage for photos, movies etc and only 500GB for the time machine backups. If partitioning is not possible, will old backups automatically delete themselves from the TC as the storage fills up with the other files I load up on there? Or will I have to delete the old backups manually myself?
Also, as a safe guard, I plan to get a 2TB portable hard rive (Mac & time machine supported) to completely mirror the contents of the time capsule (i.e.. have 2 back ups of separate disks). I understand I will have to plug this into the Macbook each time (to do the time machine backups and add new files), but my question is whether or not this setup is a good way to keep multiple backups, just in case one of the Hard Drives (most likely the TC) dies. I'm quite new to the back up game, but I want to minimise risk (of course) and keep a consistency between the portable hard drive and the TC: I want them to be identical so I don't have files/backups on one HD but not on the other.
I hope to get some good responses !

Answer 1

You cannot partition a TC. Not without voiding warranty, opening it and doing it externally.
Even when you do external partition the TC will throw up disk errors so don't go that way.
See pondini on ways to control the size of the sparsebundle.
Q3 here http://pondini.org/TM/Time_Capsule.html
Also, as a safe guard, I plan to get a 2TB portable hard rive (Mac & time machine supported) to completely mirror the contents of the time capsule (i.e.. have 2 back ups of separate disks). I understand I will have to plug this into the Macbook each time (to do the time machine backups and add new files), but my question is whether or not this setup is a good way to keep multiple backups,
Time Machine is far more limited than you think..
You cannot backup the TC.. it is a network drive. It is used as a target for the backup but it cannot be included in the backup. Therefore it is not possible to do what you are planning.. at least without buying another backup software like CCC which does have the ability to backup network drives.
In many ways the problem is that TC is not designed as a NAS.. which is what you want to use it as.
It is better IMHO to buy a NAS, if that is what you want.. although most NAS that are TM compatible don't handle TM very well, CCC can. Every NAS made can back itself up.. so you simply have a USB drive plugged in and the NAS keep itself backed up. Buy a decent NAS with mirrored drives and that also helps.. not for backup but protection against a faulty drive.