Time Machine to Airport Extreme data transfer rate

[oik]

I guess that I am not the first to meet with this problem but I have plugged through this bulletin board most of this morning and haven't found the solution to my problem. I have however learnt a lot about Macs. I might have missed something so sorry if this is a duplicated post.

I am doing an initial back up for Time Machine. I've got 56Gigs worth of data to back up from my 2Ghz Uni Body MacBook (with 4gig of Ram & running OS 10.5.7). I have a newly purchased Airport Extreme base station to which is connected to a Western Digital 1 Gig External HD. I am getting a transfer rate of about 1 gig per hour. Is it really this slow? 🙁 I am using a 5Ghz network to reduce interference and they are very close to each other.

I tried connecting the WD drive to the MB. After I switched off Virus Barrier V5 and stopped Spotlight indexing it was quite fast. However there didn't seem a way of tricking this backup to think it was done via Airport Extreme. How could this be done?

It looks like my MB is going to have to be left on and stay at home for the next couple of days!!! Any advice would be gratefully appreciated.

 

[jamin100]

Yes it is that slow, but its only the initial backup where you'll have to leave it on for a day or two. After that the backups are incremental and only backing up what has changed.

There is a guide somewhere to show you how to do the initial time machine backup via USB. Its not as easy as just plugging it in and letting it run as the AEBS use a different file system than normal

 

[oik]

Thanks jamin100. My attempts to trick the copy I created using a direct connection into a copy from a AE network connected disk come to nothing. I got stuck with some nasty permission problems. I, the owner of this MB, wasn't allowed to open the spare bundle disk image that TM had created! It good that I've got the week off for revision so I can just leave to do its stuff slowwwwly.

 

[aicul]

If you plan a full initial backup for timemachine over wifi you are going in for a long wait. Real long.

A cable is really a great recommendation.

If you must do it by wifi, consider doing it in steps by using the Time Machine "do not backup" option. Select nearly everything, do a backup, deselect some folders, do a backup, deselect some more, etc.. until everything is backed-up.

In this way you have more control of what is happening and can be sure things are moving forwards.

 

[oik]

So aicul how do i make the back up I've done with the external HD connected via cable appear when its connected back to the AEBS? When I opened the partition that had I created the two TM back ups (one via AEBS, the other direct) had a very different structure and permissions.

 

[aicul]

Oik, my answer was related to the long initial backup time of timemachine.

So you can compare, if you connected the disk to the mac direct via cable and did a backup, you should see a sparsebundle file with a name that looks like your mac name and the MAC address (I think). Opening that yields a backups.backupdb folder that contains a folder with your mac name which in turn contains a series of folders with a date/time that each contain the files being backed-up (normally Macintosh HD/etc..)

If this does not seem similar ... "maybe" better off starting again, after all it is the "initial" backup so you are not really losing anything (except of course time..)

FYI, I had a few mixed difficulties with timemachine until it starter working, now I have 6 mac backed up on one timecapsule, no problems !

Hope this is somehow useful...

 

[oik]

Thanks for replying so soon aicul. After 13 hours the wireless backup pooped out. The console gave the following error message:

25/05/2009 18:44:16 com.apple.metadata.mds[33] error reading directory: Input/output error

The AEBS has managed to loose the disk attached to it. When I tried to reconnect the disk selection dialogue box showed a not entry sign has my screen shot shows then I little later it gave the following message:

25/05/2009 19:38:00 com.apple.metadata.mds[33] Unexpected reply from backup server - ignored

I then tried to open the sparse bundle image and got a message saying it was unavailable. It could be corrupted?

From my experience it appears that I will have to wait over two whole days to get the initial back done with high risk of the AEBS loosing connection and bug***ing the whole thing up. This was this feature that I paid for. I tried to create a sparse bundle image with the correct name but it didn't show up in the disk selection box.

Being an Apple user of some 15 years I am very disappointed by my experience of the AEBS. I appears Time Machine works well with disk directly connected, which is fine for desktops. But for laptop users like myself the wireless backup capability is what we want but the transfer speed even with n spec connection is neither fast or reliable enough yet.

It looks like I will take the AEBS back to the Apple shop and ask for a refund.

 

[MAC-PRO-DEMON]

I have a 1GB/s Ethernet Network throughout my house.... and it works great for me... with both a Time Capsule and a Drobo with Droboshare!! So... I can't really help.. but I would seriously advise you to get a Cable out!! Even a standard ethernet cable can handle 1GB/s Ethernet... so just plug it in!! It should be so so so so much faster!!

 

[xraydoc]

Even Apple recommends the first backup be done over ethernet. Subsequent backups are much, much faster and not a problem via wifi.

But even over gigabit ethernet, 56GB will take a while...

 

[oik]

Okay, so I tried just connecting the WD hd directly to the MB and putting the contents in a sparse image. I made sure it had the computer name and the Ethernet MAC address, not the AirPort one in the file name. But it didn't play ball, I suspect there a permission problem.

Maybe some very cleaver programmer could write a little ditti that tricked it into believing that it was made over a network? The people could do the initial back in a few hours with it directly connected run the program/script connect it to a AEBS or NAS and hay presto TM thinks its did it. People *might* even pay for it!!

Back to my story, I took the advice of MAC-PRO-DEMON and connected a cable, reset the whole AEBS and modem. Now the intial back is only going to take 28hrs, a vast improvement! Half the time. Now I've calmed down the AEBS will not be going back to the shop. Thanks once again for everyone helpful comments.