Time Capsule as a hard drive missing data

Question

I've had a time capsule for a few years now, and have been using it both through Time Machine to back up my computer, and as an external hard drive to store photos and videos. The hard drive on my computer had been reaching capacity, so I sought to move my pictures onto the time capsule (as you would on a hard drive) and then proceed to delete the files from the hard drive on my laptop. I was doing this again last night and went to double check some photos I had stored a few months ago, only to find that I can no longer access them! The strange thing is, the file names of my lost photos are still visible, but I am unable to access them.
Can anyone help solve this? I don't want to continue to move photos onto my time capsule if it will continue to be unreliable for storing data. I may just resort to purchasing a separate hard drive for my file storage, and simply using my time capsule for time machine.
I am using a 2008 macbook and running snow leopard (OSX 10.6.8). I purchased my 1TB time capsule in 2010.

Answer 1

Can anyone help solve this? I don't want to continue to move photos onto my time capsule if it will continue to be unreliable for storing data. I may just resort to purchasing a separate hard drive for my file storage, and simply using my time capsule for time machine.
Conceptually I think there’s a tendency to view the Time Capsule as a kind of fail-safe storehouse for computer data, almost as if it were a traditional time capsule preserving physical objects for future generations, decades or even centuries later. In reality Apple’s Time Capsule relies on a hard disk drive that is pretty much the same as, and likely no better at preserving data than, the disk in your MacBook. Thus if you copy files to the TC and delete them from your MacBook, you're simply moving stuff around. You still only have a single copy of the files, and they’re still stored on a prone-to-failure hard disk drive. And in the process the basic backup function of the Time Capsule has been utterly defeated.
That has never stopped me from doing exactly what you’re doing, but I tend not to store anything on the TC except useless crap that I won’t miss too much when the TC disk fails, corruption or a read/write error occurs when connected to the TC, or the whole thing just burns up due to overheating. I gather you value your images and videos more highly than this, and consequently I think your idea about purchasing an external hard drive is probably sensible. If connected directly to your MacBook, it should provide more reliability and speed, and you can then also use Time Machine to back it up to your TC as well.
Unfortunately, I think the inaccessible zero KB files shown in your “2009” folder are gone, if they were ever really there. I wonder if when you copied them to the TC back on April 2 there was some kind of connection failure or write error that you didn’t notice, which aborted the process, leaving only these empty ghost entries behind in the disk’s index. In any event, it looks like there’s nothing there now.
You also seem to be running very low on disk space and might want to think about a new 2 or 3TB TC.