A series of problems with Time Capsule

Question

I was an early adopter of Apple's "Time Capsule," which in theory sounds like a great idea but has been a disaster for me in practice. This is the story of my nightmare.
In theory, Time Capsule is supposed to enable wireless, automatic backups of my hard drive via wifi. I liked the idea because I thought it would save me time and make backups so convenient that they'd be sure to happen.
In practice, it's been slow, aggravating and buggy as ****.
After I bought the device, I brought it home and set it up to do the initial backup of my laptop computer. My first mistake, as I learned later, was to try to do the initial backup wirelessly. The Time Capsule has an Ethernet connection that works faster than the wireless connection. (It ought to have a USB or Firewire port, which would be far faster than Ethernet, but apparently the Apple gods decided to save a nickle at the expense of quality and convenience.) It would also have been nice if the manual that came with the thing recommended using Ethernet for the initial backup, but it didn't, so I didn't discover that this was even an option until I had already wasted several days.
Yes, days. Not hours, but days.
I started the initial backup on a Wednesday night. My laptop's hard drive had about 130 gigabytes of files on it, and after the initial backup had run for a couple of hours, I did a calculation based on megabytes/minute and figured that it should finish up sometime that weekend. This meant that I couldn't take my laptop away from the house or turn it off, but after I'd already invested a few hours in the process, I figured I'd just let it run until completed.
Unfortunately, the longer the backup proceeded, the slower the megabytes/minute rate became. By the following Monday morning, it was only 2/3 completed, and the copy rate had slowed to such a crawl that I had no idea when it would finish. I therefore reluctantly interrupted the process, since I had meetings to attend where I needed my computer.
By that time, I had done some further research online and learned that people were recommending doing the initial backup via Ethernet, so when I got home that Monday night, I decided to do it that way instead of via wifi. However, it was unable to resume the interrupted backup, so I had to start over from scratch. Over the course of several attempts to do this, I discovered moreover that the interrupted backup had corrupted the disk somehow, so eventually I had no choice but to erase the Time Capsule entirely before beginning a new backup. Each of these attempts took a half hour or an hour, so I wasted my Monday evening doing nothing but try and retry to start the backup. (Somewhere in the middle of this I also did a tech support call to Apple, which also meant time on the phone, sitting on hold, etc.)
Finally, sometime on Tuesday I got the backup started, and by late that evening I had my first incremental backup. Hooray! Or so I thought.
The thing ran OK for a month or so, and then for no apparent reason I discovered that backups were failing. Why? No idea. I called Apple tech support again. An hour or so on hold, then talking to an operator, then trying various things. Eventually the tech support guy told me I'd have to erase the hard drive again and do a new initial backup. Great. At least I knew by then that I'd need to do it via Ethernet, but of course it took the better part of a day for the backup to run, and starting over meant losing all of the history in my previous backups. But I did it.
After that, I had a good run for several months...maybe six months. Then, for no apparent reason, the backups started failing again. This time I managed to get the backups working again by unplugging the Time Capsule, plugging it back in, and doing some reset procedures.
A month later, the Ethernet connection started failing.
I have an old iMac upstairs that I plugged in to the Ethernet connection so it can access the internet and file-share with my laptop. One day I noticed that the iMac's internet connection was no longer working. After some testing, it turned out that neither the iMac nor my laptop is able to connect anymore through the Ethernet connection. I tried several cables, tried playing around with settings, to no avail. I had a trip to Hong Kong coming up, so I decided I'd worry about the Ethernet connection after I got home.
On the Saturday before my Monday morning flight to Hong Kong, my laptop died.
It was working fine on Friday evening. I went to bed, got up, and the screen was black. In a panic, I drove to the Apple store and, after much pleading, got them to look at the thing in a hurry. Their tests showed that the logic board was bad. Fortunately, they had a replacement in stock, so they were actually able to repair the laptop in only two hours.
Since then, however, I haven't been able to get backups to work at all on my Time Capsule.
When the laptop died, I figured I might need to restore files from the Time Capsule, so I unplugged it and took it with me on my frantic drive to the Apple Store. After I brought it home and plugged it back in, the laptop recognizes that it exists, but instead of doing an imcremental backup, Time Machine wants to start all over with a backup of more than 140 gigabytes.
No ******* way.
My plan at this point is to make an appointment at the Apple Store and take it in to someone at their Genius Bar. Maybe they can figure out why Ethernet isn't working and why the incremental backups aren't happening. In the meantime, I don't know if any of the backups that it has done to date are any good, so it's an uneasy feeling. And, of course, I've wasted more time than I care to think about just tweaking and nursing the thing.
It just isn't worth it.
If anyone has any suggestions for what I should be trying at this point, I'd love to hear advice.

Answer 1

I've got some time here as I wait on my computer (more on that in a moment), so in the meantime I re-read Smokerz's reply to my message. Upon re-reading, I thought I'd respond again.
Smokerz is saying basically that Time Capsule is great for purposes OTHER than backing up my computer's hard drive: "Make your primary TM backup using an external FW800 drive first. ... I don't do TM on TC but use TC as my internet file server for my family who all lives far from one another and stream movies to my ATV. Much better use of TC, eh?"
There might be a case for that use of Time Capsule, but the product is advertised and sold primarily as a wireless backup device. The main page for the product on apple.com describes it as "Automatic wireless backup for your Mac. ... Time Capsule is a revolutionary backup device that works wirelessly with Time Machine in Mac OS X Leopard. It automatically backs up everything, so you no longer have to worry about losing your digital life."
Smokerz is therefore arguing that I should be happy with a product that doesn't work for the purpose for which it is primarily advertised and for which I bought it. I don't have any use for it as an internet file server or to stream movies. To say I should be happy with it for those purposes makes no sense.
Here's a little update on my experience with this thing. I made an appointment and visited the Genius Bar at the Apple Store yesterday. My appointment was at 10:40. I spoke with *** ****, who by the way is "Lead Genius" at the West Towne story in Madison, WI. I've got no problems with him. Like every other Apple employee I've dealt with locally, he was competent, courteous and and helpful. He quickly fixed my Ethernet problem, but the more important problem -- the failure to connect to my existing backups -- left him stumped as it did me. The problem apparently is that when Time Machine uses the MAC address of your computer's logic board as part of its way of identifying your system. There is a file on the backup drive that stores this information. It's filename consists of a period followed by the old MAC address. There is a procedure for renaming that file and changing some other settings which is supposed to make the backup work again. The procedure is detailed here:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080128003716101
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6893237
The problem in my case is that the file was missing when I went looking for it. (I hadn't been mucking around on my Time Capsule, so I don't see any way that I could possibly have deleted it.)
After some scratching his head, *** asked me to leave my computer and Time Capsule with him at the Apple Store and come back at 2:30 that afternoon. When I returned, not much progress had been made. He had found a way to make Time Machine do another initial backup from scratch within the same sparsebundle as my older backups and thought that once that backup completed, there would be a way to connect up with the the older backups. By 2:30, however, the backup had only completed 4 GB out of the 130 gigs on my hard drive. The Apple Store closes at 9 p.m., so I would have had to leave it with them overnight just to get through that stage of the process. I think I mentioned previously that I live an hour's drive from the Apple Store, and since I had already burned another entire day trying to get this thing working, I had *** give it back to me so I could take it home and try to complete the procedure myself.
Once I got it home, I let the backup run overnight. It took about 12 hours to complete. Now I'm going through the procedure *** gave me, which is documented in a little more detail here on Sean Kelly's blog:
http://seankelly.tv/blog/blogentry.2008-08-25.8041499927
I just finished spending an hour waiting for the computer to open my sparsebundle (step three of Sean Kelly's procedure). Only six more steps to go!
<Edited by Moderator>