How long should initial Time Capsule backup take via Ethernet?

[Ben1l]

I have just bought a new Macbook Pro (entry level 15") and a 500 GB Time Capsule.
I connected my Macbook Pro to the Time Capsule to via ethernet to do the initial backup which was around 40GB.

The backup took nearly 5 hours!

I was under the impression that both the Macbook and the Time Capsule had super-fast "gigabit ethernet".

is it possible that i'm using the wrong sort of ethernet cable and i need some sort of gigabit version?

Having used a USB hard drives in the past to do time machines back ups i remember backing up 80gb in about an hour.

I have two other machines to back up to the Time Capsule and am really not looking forward to the prospect of another 15 hours of waiting... can anyone give me some advice?

Many thanks

 

[italiano40]

that is a bug sometimes just reset the whole thing and after that it works prefectly

 

[Ben1l]

that is a bug sometimes just reset the whole thing and after that it works prefectly

when you say works perfectly, so how long should i expect a 40gb initial back up to take via ethernet?

 

[italiano40]

restart the back up process

thru math it should take about an hour

 

[Sesshi]

It might be a little quicker, it might be correct - not entirely sure. However that seems on the slightly faster side for me as far as my experience is concerned.

The key is that Gigabit isn't necessarily Gigabit. i.e. it doesn't actually provide a throughput of 128MBytes/sec. This is the wire speed, and is completely irrelevant to the actual throughput you get. The Time Capsule is a low-powered NAS and what you're actually going to see over Ethernet is Megabit throughput, not Gigabit - and it will not anywhere approach USB 2.0 wire speeds.

 

[kuebby]

^He's right. My initial backup took somewhere in the neighborhood of what yours did.

 

[Ben1l]

Surly then, that is a huge design flaw?

Why on earth didn't Apple include a firewire 400 port (that nearly all their machines have) to do a super fast initial back up, and then the user could switch to Wireless or ethernet just to do the hourly backups?

 

[Batt]

Surly then, that is a huge design flaw?

Why on earth didn't Apple include a firewire 400 port (that nearly all their machines have) to do a super fast initial back up, and then the user could switch to Wireless or ethernet just to do the hourly backups?

My initial 40GB backup (via ethernet) took somewhere around 4.5 or 5 hours also. And I would have killed for a firewire port. It's fine now, though. Takes 1.5 or 2 minutes to do a wireless backup.

 

[bigjnyc]

my initial back up was 65GB i was doing it via wireless last night and it was taking a really long time so i just left it running and went to sleep. it was done in the morning when i got up so i dont know how long it took.

 

[eRondeau]

It's not simply a matter of "doing the math". OS X Leopard has somewhere around 700,000 (nearly three-quarters of a million!) different files, in tens of thousands of directories. Each time you need to back-up a directory, it's got to make several different reads/writes in order to update the hard disk's look-up tables. So yeah while a single 40GB file would probably copy in about an hour -- 40,000 1MB files would take considerably longer. And note that's got absolutely nothing to do with your connection speed, be it wireless or gigabit or 800/400 FireWire. In this case, you're quite literally waiting for the write disk to keep up.

 

[SDDave2007]

The times mentioned in these posts are all in line with reality. Ethernet/FW/Serial you name it... does NOT transmits one byte down the wire for one byte of data on your disk. It makes packets with sometimes quite large wrappers.... plus Time Machine needs to scan and analyze your disk to decide how to organize the backup... then needs to parse the recieved data into the proper places...

My first backup took multiple hours.... subsequent ones take from 5 seconds to 10 minutes depending on what I did in the previous hour.

So not to worry.. your Time Machine/Time Capsule is working just fine.

 

[netnothing]

Also, if your computer has Gigbit ethernet network ports, then make sure the cable you are using is Cat5e or Cat6. This way you'll get the 1Gbit/s speeds as opposed to the 100Mbit/s speeds.

You can check by going to the Network Utility in the Utilities folder to see what speed you are connected at.

I had an older cable, and when I got the TC, I used it to plug my new MacBook in. It only showed the 100Mbit/s speeds. I replaced it with a Cat5e cable, and it switched over to 1Gbit/s.

-Kevin

 

[Sesshi]

Surly then, that is a huge design flaw?

Why on earth didn't Apple include a firewire 400 port (that nearly all their machines have) to do a super fast initial back up, and then the user could switch to Wireless or ethernet just to do the hourly backups?

Switching between DAS mode and NAS mode requires additional processing junk, which means more money. It's not a design flaw - it's a fairly typical approach on low cost NAS's. Faster NAS's offer speeds slightly more in line with what you'd expect with Gigabit, but they also cost considerably more because they're almost PC's.

Whatever people above tell you, the facts are that the TC transfers data in line with budget NAS's - look here, and put your finger slightly below the middle of the chart - and that's roughly where the TC falls.