Time machine via the network

[robanga]

Decided it was time to back up my little over a month old MBP using time machine. There is a 1TB FW800 drive attached to the iMac, so I used the network to mount that drive for the MBP and tell Time Machine to back up there. There is only about 21GB to backup.

Its taking a long time 😎 Keeping in mind that the initial backup is the longest and all that indexing has to be done etc, it still feels too long. It's been about 3 hours and I'm only into it a little over 7GB. This is on a 802.11G router.

Any thoughts or like experiences?

 

[crazzyeddie]

Why would you ever backup over an 802.11g network? The max speed you will theoretically see over that network is 8MB/sec, which would mean that it would take the better part of an hour.... realistically, you're going to see 1-2MB/sec, meaning it will take 4-8 hours to backup, if it completes at all.

There's a reason Apple tells you to use USB or Firewire for Time Machine, and you should at least use Ethernet if you insist on using a network drive.

 

[robanga]

Good point, I had not thought about the bandwidth of the 802.11 very much. Backing up a mobile computer is kind of a pain, I guess i could plug in and unplug the drive to this one, that just seems silly though.

Guess I'll by another more portable but high capacity drive for the notebook.

 

[cmaier]

I've been using 802.11g for my time machine backups and its fine. Other than the first backup (which took all night) and one other backup (after i installed adobe cs3) which took a few hours, every backup has completed in just a few minutes.

As long as you set time machine to exclude things like your entourage mailbox and your parallels/vmware virtual machine files, you probably aren't changing enough data between each backup to cause 802.11 backups to take very long.

 

[robanga]

Also a pretty good point, perhaps I was being a bit too impatient. I am still undecided on my backup strategy except I do know that I'd better get it too it for the MBP.