Can I extend time capsule by adding external drive connected TC via USB?

Hi,
I use my TC drive for backups, i's now full. Can I extend time capsule backup drive by adding external drive connected TC via USB? If yes, how do I his? I have 1TB WD external drive connected via the TC's USB, I can see the WD drive in the finder and the TC set-up...but I don't know where to go from here...
Thanks for your help
Steveru

Welcome to the discussions, Steveru!
I think what you are asking is can you simply continue Time Machine backups by adding the new USB drive, correct? The answer is not exactly. See below for details.
To use the new USB drive for Time Machine backups, you'll need to Open System Preferences (gear icon) on the dock and open Time Machine. Click on Select Disk and click your USB drive to highlight it, then click Use for Backup. Here's the rub....Time Machine will make a new full complete backup of everything on your Mac's hard drive. There's no way to avoid this. After that, it will continue to make scheduled incremental backups just like it did before on the Time Capsule.
If you ever need to go back to your original backups on the Time Capsule, you'll need to right-click the Time Capsule icon on the dock and choose Browse Other Time Machine Disks.
When the USB drive start to fill, you may decide that you no longer need all the old backups on the Time Capsule disk since you should have a good history of backups on the USB drive at that point.
So, you could erase the Time Capsule disk and then start backing up to the Time Capsule disk again. At that time, it will also make a complete backup on the first pass and then normal incremental backups from that point forward. When the TC begins to fill again, then you could erase the older backups on the USB drive and start backups again on that drive. Then switch to the other drive in the future to keep things going indefinitely. If you go with this type of flip flop plan, you should always have a solid history of many months of backups at any given time.
Will a plan like this work? I don't answer a question on the forum unless I've done it myself. This has been working well for me for almost 3 years.
Pondini, the resident expert on Time Machine and Time Capsule affairs, may have some comments on this as well. If you haven't already seen his excellent guide, Using Time Machine with a Time Capsule or +Time Machine FAQ+, these are the best available sources of information on this subject on the Internet.
Or, if you don't want to erase any your backups, you could of course keep adding a new USB drive when the current drive is about to fill.

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