Use Time Capsule as a Hard Drive via Ethernet for Time Machine

Hi Folks
To summarise a very very long story here goes;
- About 12 months ago my father in law buys a Time Capsule without really knowing what it is for and how it works (I know don't ask!!!!!)
- I set it up for him connected to his wireless router so he uses his router to access the internet and uses the Time Capsule to back up his iMac via wireless with Time Machine. (from what I can see he could have saved himself some cash and just bought an external Hard Drive and connect it via USB to the iMac for Time Machine, but never mind. He has 1 iMac and no other Mac's in the household. His printer is connected to his iMac via USB in the same room and he uses a wireless router to access the internet, since the phone point is in another room)
- All is well until Monday when he tells me he cannot access the internet. After much much trial and error I have eventually managed to get his internet back up and running, but he has somehow managed to erase his Time Capsule.
- I set his Time Capsule back up as it was previously and it starts performing the initial backup again. However at the rate its taking I think it will take well in excess of 24hrs to do that initial
backup. Also so far It has failed 3 times during this initial backup and I get an error message stating it's failed. The setup guide makes reference to performing the initial backup via ethernet as it's quicker.
I'm thinking the best way forward would be to just plug the Time Capsule into the iMac via ethernet and use it purely as a Hard Drive for use with Time Machine. I've tried just plugging in the ethernet cable from the Time Capsule to the iMac, but it doesn't recognise it. Bear in mind that it currently works via wireless, do I need to perform some sort of factory reset or how do I go about telling the the iMac to no longer use the Time Capsule wireless, but just connect via ethernet instead.
Of course I could just forget about the Time Capsule all together and tell him to get a 500gb USB External Hard Drive, plug that in and set up Time Machine with that instead.
Am I missing the point here and can the Time Capsule do a lot more for him, given his current setup.
Thanks

That is true but if you mix your files with the Time Machine backups, Time Machine will have trouble contril disk space when it gets low.
If you are going to do that it is recommended that you partition the drive. Since Time Capsule is not able to partition the drive that means you will have to remove it in order to partition it.
A simple solution IMO is to get another external drive and hang it on the USB bus in the Time Capasule.
Allan

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