MacPro and Time Machine Question

[xBeeza]

Hi -

I’m currently backing up my MacPro to a 250gb external drive via USB. I’m about to purchase an Apple Time Capsule 1TB to allow for backing up the additional HDs that I’ve installed in my MacPro. Can I just copy the existing TM folder from my external HD to the new Time Capsule and continue to do updated backups or do I have to start a new backup from the day I install the TC ? Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated….Thanks

 

[Virtuoso]

Hi -
I’m currently backing up my MacPro to a 250gb external drive via USB. I’m about to purchase an Apple Time Capsule 1TB to allow for backing up the additional HDs that I’ve installed in my MacPro. Can I just copy the existing TM folder from my external HD to the new Time Capsule and continue to do updated backups or do I have to start a new backup from the day I install the TC ? Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated….Thanks

Check the many problem threads on the Time Capsule section of Apple Discussions before you waste your money. The Time Capsule is painfully slow, even over gigabit ethernet, riddled with issues, and probably the worst piece of IT hardware I've ever bought.

The data transfer rate is typically 8MB/s - far short of the 60-70MB/s you get from a FW800 drive, so if you're looking to back up multiple large hard drives, you may find it takes DAYS rather than hours to finish.

I'd just get an external 1TB hard drive if I were you, preferably one with Firewire 800 for speedy backups.

 

[vansouza]

TC is nice and shiny but FireWire is so much faster... a lot faster.

 

[akm3]

Time Capsule is slow, but thats not an issue past the initial backup.

The more important issue is 'do you need a router', and 'will you have Mac's backing up wirelessly?;

If either of those are no, Time Capsule probably isn't worth the money and an external drive makes a lot more sense (pop a usb or firewire drive right off the Mac Pro and call it good).

Alternatively, if you want more redundant backup, you can look at a RAID system or for ease of use (but expensive) Drobo for an excellent, redundant, Time Machine disk.

 

[Virtuoso]

Time Capsule is slow, but thats not an issue past the initial backup.

Well, it's an issue every time you want to either write or read large files to or from the disk. And if you ever need to restore your whole system from a backup, you could be down for a couple of days! I had expected much more from this device - it has the performance of a hard drive from 20 years ago!

Here's a chart from Apple Insider showing some speed tests first using the various wired and wireless modes of the TC and then showing standard Airport and G5 network transfer rates:-

So using the fastest wired gigabit connection, trying to restore a 300GB system drive would mean at best over 8 hours downtime!

Not only does if fall way short of gigabit speeds, the advertised printer sharing doesn't work either.

Trust me, if you don't want to wait an eternity to get things done, you're better off going with an external FW800 or SATA drive.

 

[akm3]

Well, it's an issue every time you want to either write or read large files to or from the disk. And if you ever need to restore your whole system from a backup, you could be down for a couple of days! I had expected much more from this device - it has the performance of a hard drive from 20 years ago!

Here's a chart from Apple Insider showing some speed tests first using the various wired and wireless modes of the TC and then showing standard Airport and G5 network transfer rates:-

So using the fastest wired gigabit connection, trying to restore a 300GB system drive would mean at best over 8 hours downtime!

Not only does if fall way short of gigabit speeds, the advertised printer sharing doesn't work either.

Trust me, if you don't want to wait an eternity to get things done, you're better off going with an external FW800 or SATA drive.

This is a well researched reply! I'm impressed and the Time Capsule is slower then I even thought it was. I didn't consider the 'restore' time. And, I've also had minor problems with the USB printing, but just haven't taken the time to try to fix them yet. You might be right! Hopefully a fireware update will fix everything.

Now the question I have...WHY is it so slow? Is it the actual hard drive/communications or is it related to the spare bundle being slow to generate/write or what?

 

[dchao]

Now the question I have...WHY is it so slow? Is it the actual hard drive/communications or is it related to the spare bundle being slow to generate/write or what?

Probably due to the underpowered processor, very little RAM. I think it's quite an engineering achievement to port OS X onto a tiny router like this. I won't expect Linksys or Dlink to be able to handle this kind of tasks.

 

[rockinrocker]

the other question here, (and i've been wondering this myself as my TM volume as about full and i'd rather trade it then add to it) is what's involved with changing TM volumes? it'd be pretty lame to have to start over on a new one just because you wanted to change disc's....

 

[aLoC]

I don't thinik you can just copy the Backups folder across. When you are back up to a local disk Time Machine uses a folder, but when backing up to a Time Capsule it uses something else I believe (a .dmg maybe?). This is just something I remember reading somewhere, you'll have to confirm from another source.

 

[rockinrocker]

I don't thinik you can just copy the Backups folder across. When you are back up to a local disk Time Machine uses a folder, but when backing up to a Time Capsule it uses something else I believe (a .dmg maybe?). This is just something I remember reading somewhere, you'll have to confirm from another source.

hmm, i wonder if disc utility is required or something?

 

[dchao]

I don't thinik you can just copy the Backups folder across. When you are back up to a local disk Time Machine uses a folder, but when backing up to a Time Capsule it uses something else I believe (a .dmg maybe?). This is just something I remember reading somewhere, you'll have to confirm from another source.

The TC backup are stored into one big sparsebundle image file. If you do "show package contents", it will not find individual Mac files in there but they are broken down and packed into bands of 8MB stripe for fast transfer across network.

 

[krye]

I'm sure it's nice having a shiny new box with the Apple logo on it. But backups over 802.11n are a joke. Save yourself the cash and just buy a FW800 enclosure and put a 1T drive in it.

 

[Virtuoso]

Backups over wired gigabit connections are a joke. It's very odd that the speed from this supposedly gigabit device is pretty much exactly what you would expect from a standard 100mbit device (ie it maxes out at 12MB/s).

What gives? Are they lying about it being a gigabit device? There's no way I would have wasted $550 on it if I'd known it was going to be so slow.


(The rest of my network happily shuffles huge files around at proper gigabit speeds - I get transfer rates of 70-90MB/s. The only thing running slowly on my whole network (8PCs+2Macs) is the Time Capsule.)

 

[hexonxonx]

I only back to on my Mac Pro to a separate disk and it is very fast this way. Using Time Capsule or a disk attached to an AEBS is too slow. My hourly backuos take seconds and the initial backup took less than an hour.

 

[Siron]

the other question here, (and i've been wondering this myself as my TM volume as about full and i'd rather trade it then add to it) is what's involved with changing TM volumes? it'd be pretty lame to have to start over on a new one just because you wanted to change disc's....

That's what I love about my DROBO. Admittedly it's expensive (and not too swift compared with FireWire) but there is a huge advantage in being able to swap out discs or add new discs to increase storage.
Talking about a restore from TM being slow, is disk cloning any quicker?

 

[dchao]

Backups over wired gigabit connections are a joke. It's very odd that the speed from this supposedly gigabit device is pretty much exactly what you would expect from a standard 100mbit device (ie it maxes out at 12MB/s).

What gives? Are they lying about it being a gigabit device? There's no way I would have wasted $550 on it if I'd known it was going to be so slow.


(The rest of my network happily shuffles huge files around at proper gigabit speeds - I get transfer rates of 70-90MB/s. The only thing running slowly on my whole network (8PCs+2Macs) is the Time Capsule.)

As I've said, to meet the cost constraint, TC probably has a low power processor inside, just to keep up with the task of doing backup in the Background. You are asking too much if you want TC to perform as well as a NAS.