Time Capsule: How long should the first back up take?

[VideoBeagle]

How long should the first back up for Time Machine take?
my drive is a 1TB fusion drive, 500GB filled....it's taking a VERY long time....like 12 hours so far.. It's not frozen, just REALLY REALLY slow.
Is this normal?

 

[aristobrat]

I don't think many folks have been impressed by the speed of Time Capsule backups, especially the first one. Were you able to use an Ethernet cable for the first one?

I use it for the Macs in my house because it's convenient. It's always been slow for me.

You should be able to click on the Time Machine icon on your Menu Bar and see how far it's progressed.

 

[satinsilverem2]

Are you doing the initial backup over wifi or ethernet?

 

[VideoBeagle]

It's over USB3.

(I apologize for the cliche drive name, but I found a really nice icon to use)

 

[JohnDS]

Go to the Spotlight preferences and add the external drive to the exclusions so that Spotlight is not try to index the backup as it is being copied.

 

[BigMcGuire]

I found time machine backups to slow down significantly if I was doing heavy file transfers or data usage on disk (either disk, the target or time machine disk). Goes pretty fast otherwise, in my opinion. I use a WD Passport Mac drive (USB powered). Initial backup for me was about 50GB and it took .... wow I can't remember really, an hour to two hours? Backups now average 200mb-6GB and they're usually pretty quick.

 

[randomgeeza]

Wired, about 90 - 100G per hour. Wireless... too long 5, 6+ hours...

 

[VideoBeagle]

Then something is wrong.. AND I just had a power outage, which scragged the transfer, so what was ongoing is now useless.
[doublepost=1466726690][/doublepost]And, when I last posted, it said it would auto start again in an hour..so I was gonna let it...then walked away, when I came back, it's running, seems to be going faster, and actually tells me how long it's gonna take now.

(I actually had quit, reformated and started again after reading JohnDS posts above, so it being at 8 gigs rather than in the hundreds it's fine.--- in the time between taken the screen shot and typing this, it's gone from 8.15 gb to 11.9 gb, so it's defiintly speeding up (hitting 12 gigs as I finish this sentence).

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EDIT: and in the 5 minutes since I posted the update, it's hit 50 gigs copied and 3 hours remaining.
I should have just kicked the power out hours ago to speed things up.

 

[VideoBeagle]

And 2 hours later, I'm at 19 minutes remaining... I have no idea what's going on.