I recently purchased a Time Capsule from Apple (apple link). I used to backup through an external Hard Disk and was not satisfied with this solution.

The promise is simple : Easily backup all your files over the network.

What it does not tell you is that there are small tips you should know before you start your backup.

After a full week end of tries, internet searches, I finally found the solution with the help of Apple Care this morning. I decided to call them when my TC had only backed up 18GB out of 130GB in 20 hours using a wired cable!

So here are the tips:

1) Do the first backup on a cable. DO NOT USE WIRELESS. The speed will be much faster

2) Use Ethernet. Disconnect your Mac and TC from the network and plug an Ethernet cable directly to the LAN port of TC (not the WAN port)

3) Turn Airport OFF on the Mac and make sure you keep a minimum of activity on the Mac

4) DO NOT INTERRUPT THE FIRST BACKUP. If you do so, you would have to restart right from scratch

5) The most important thing is to select the right Ethernet cable. It should be a 1GB cable to optimize the transfer speed. You need to buy a CAT 6 Ethernet cable! (I wish I knew that before starting the long process)

6) Check the speed in Network Utility. It should say 1GB/s

7) Deactivate your anti-virus to reduce the computer activity

You can expect a speed of around 1.1GB/5mn. It means that a 130GB backup should not go beyond 6 hours. If you experience anything drastically different then you are having problems.

Subsequent backups can be run on Wireless directly. With a N network, you can expect to reach up to 300Mbs/s (up to…) :=)

There is only one limitation on TC. There is no way to start over from your old TM file you have on previous Hard Discs. That’s just too bad. Tried to copy, make a disk image, copy back to TC and mount it, this is painful and seems not to be worth it for non-techy guys like me.

I wish the Apple sales team would have told me at the point of sales about those tips.

This is something easy to explain, easy to train. Apple just have to create a small memory card for such situations and distribute it to the sales team.

Maybe next time… :=)