How long did your first wireless back up take??

Question

After doing the initial back up via ethernet, how long did your first wireless back up take?? I can't seem to get past the preparing stage. However I have recently learned that the first time backing up wirelessly, the finder indexes the back up & this can take a while. I'm leaving it a little longer now. It has been preparing for about half an hour now.
Is this normal?
How long does this indexing take?
What are your experiences?
Thanks.

Answer 1

So far for me it's been five days. I hooked up Time Capsule Thursday night, and after monitoring the progress for a few hours, I calculated that it should take three days, which I figured would mean that it should finish up by Sunday evening. (My MacBookPro had 103 gigs on it.)
It would have been nice if the instructions that came with the **** thing said something up front about hooking up via an ethernet cable for the initial backup. If I had seen those instructions before I started this nightmare, I might be done by now. Instead I started the backup wirelessly, which I'm sure accounts for some of the delay and hassle.
Unfortunately, the backup pace slowed steadily over the course of the weekend. By Saturday night, it had only done about 60 gigabyites, and by Sunday afternoon, it was only up to around 65. At that pace I figured I might be waiting another week before it finished, and since I actually take my computer with me when I leave my house, this would have deprived me of my computer for an unacceptable period. After doing some internet research and learning that using an ethernet cable would speed up the process, I therefore stopped the wireless backup, hooked up a cable, and restarted it at around 4 p.m. on Sunday afternoon.
The backup then proceeded steadily at a faster (although not exactly zippy) pace. By midnight it had gotten through about 60 gigabytes, and after timing the rate at which it was proceeding by that time, I estimated that it should finish sometime around 8 p.m. tonight (Monday).
I left the computer along during the day while I ran errands away from home. When I got back around 6:30, it appeared to have finished the initial backup and to be in the process of finishing up an incremental backup. The progress bar said "backing up 12,443 items...51.3 MB of 51.3 MB." Unfortunately, it seems to be stuck there. It's now 8 p.m., and it still says it's working on those 51.3 MB. I don't know how much longer I should wait before deciding that it's frozen.
I'd like to just set this thing on fire. I bought the Time Capsule because I liked the idea of wireless, automatic backups. It was supposed to make my life easier, not make it a living ****.