Can't archive Time Capsule to external USB disk

I have a Time Capsule 1TB to which a bunch of Macs back up. I have also set up a 1TB USB drive with one partition as a backup drive (the other partition is for a bootable clone of my desktop).
Soon after setting up the TC/external disk, I had archived the TC backup to the external disk using the Archive function under Disks in Airport Utility. When I reconnected my disk a few days later, it mounted all right, as it showed up as an Airport disk in Airport Utility. But when I go to Archive, the Destination pulldown is grey, and shows "No Airport disks available".
I've unmounted the disk and run Repair Disk under Disk Utility, and the volumes checked out fine. I even tried downgrading the Airport firmware to 7.4.1, but no change.
Given the reported failures of TC, I am very nervous about not having a backup for the Time Capsule.
Please help.

Solved. The disk is not available to archive till there is enough free space for a complete archive. So I had to connect the drive to my iMac, delete the earlier archive, and reconnect it to the Time Capsule. Then it showed up. Now that's risky, since during archiving (12+ hours for my setup) if the TC goes down, all backups are gone.
Feature request: Could a future version of Airport Utility allow selective replacement of archived backups?

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