Slow USB transfer to Time Capsule

I recently purchased a Time Capsule and have decided in addition to its Time Machine back-up duties to use it to store my iTunes Media, which I had previously had on an external USB HDD (and then use the external USB to back-up Media drive through a folder-syncing app, since Time Machine won't recognise a networked drive). I've connected the USB drive to the TC, and attempted to drag and drop the iTunes Media folder from the external USB to to TC HD.
The estimated time for completion was 7 days for 300GB of data.
Any suggestions as to what is going wrong? Please tell me that the TC isn't sending the data over wireless from the USB disk to my MacBook Pro in order to then send it back over wireless to the TC to write it to that disk! So far the TC isn't looking like a great investment - Time Machine takes so long to back up (spending 10 - 15 minutes preparing the backup and then another 10-15 minutes to write 20 - 30MB of data) that I've turned it off, because the process makes watching my iTunes content jerky. And with this data transfer problem, I'm almost ready to give up.
I'm working with a 2TB Time Capsule, 15" ealry 2011 MacBook Pro (8GB RAM, 250GB SSD), OS X Lion and a 1TB USB HDD

Please tell me that the TC isn't sending the data over wireless from the USB disk to my MacBook Pro in order to then send it back over wireless to the TC to write it to that disk!
Exactly what is happening.. sorry about that chief!! (Maxwell Smart voice).
Unfortunately if you have the external drive connected to the TC and want to write the data to the TC that is what happens.. there is no way it can directly copy since the copy is running from the laptop.
Much better to plug the external drive straight into the laptop.. and plug the laptop into the TC by ethernet cable and do the copy in one shot.. then you can do other backups (your normal incremental time machine) by wireless.
Alway try and eliminate double hop wireless.. it is incredibly slow due to having single channel half duplex operation.
Even if you have to use a separate device to do it.. the speed will be much better.
And it is better to use a usb plugged into the TC just as a backup of the TC.. use the TC itself to store your itunes rather than a drive hanging off it.

Similar Messages

Slow data transfer with Time Capsule on 802.11n ?

Hi,
Actually, I don't know where to start. But let's explain my setup first:
My iMac (wired) and AppleTV (wireless) are connected to the Time Capsule (802.11n, 5Ghz)
My girlfriend's MacBook and 2 x iPhone 2G's (wireless) are connected to an Airport Extreme Base station (802.11b/g compatible).
The Time Capsule and AEBS are connected and show two different networks.
Now the problem:
When I copy files from e.g. the iMac to the MacBook or to the Apple TV, it's very slow. I've used scp to copy a 200 mb file and it took about 1.20 minutes (at 2.5MB/s). I've did the same when the iMac was connected over wireless and it took about 3.45 to 4.30 minutes (at 1.0MB/s).
I'm not sure if this IS slow, but it certainly feels like it. 802.11n should be around 100 Mb/s in practice and 802.11b/g around 20-25 Mb/s.
By the way: downloading from the Internet is excellent, I get the full download/upload speed my provider offers for my subscription.
Second, I added the signal strength/noise levels for the Time Capsule attached devices. They vary around -68Db signal, -90Db noise.
The question is: are these levels normal ? What should be higher or lower ?
Thanks in advance !
Rutger

The new Airport Extremes and Time Capsules suffers from terrible performance over the 5GHz band and it's a problem that not only affects me and you, but hundreds of thousands of other owners.
Nobody knows if it's a firmware problem or the Marvell chips inside that's the problem, and Apple hasn't said or done anything for months.
I'm still hoping for a firmware update to solve this, but if it doesn't get fixed soon enough, I'm gonna return it and go back to backing up to wired disk and my rock solid Airport Express.
Not the happiest answer, but at least you have a clue now.
Cheers,
Koski

My PC cannot see a hard drive connected by usb to my Time Capsule!

Help please.
My PC cannot see my Toshiba hard drive connected by usb to my Time Capsule. I can see the hard drive in Airport Utility. I suspect my problem may be to do with either setting up File Sharing or else mapping............if anyone can help fix this it would be most appreciated! Thanks.

Wins server is useless.. you won't have one..
Did you turn on the guest account with full read and write permissions.. ??
Can you ping the TC ip address??
Is the airport utility on the windows machine??
Do you have a mac to access the drive?
Is it real fat32 or some strange exfat which won't work?
I also wonder if it should not be formatted on directly on the TC.. or on a Mac and formatted GUID not windows type.
Sorry not all of this is logical..
If you can access the internal disk from windows.. how are you doing that??
If the external USB drive is not working.. plug it straight into the windows machine and enjoy faster better and more consistent file copying..
Share it to the network if you want network access.

Can Time Machine back up a second external hard drive that is attached via usb to a Time Capsule?

Can Time Machine back up a second external hard drive that is attached via usb to a Time Capsule?
I have a iMac with 10.7.4

I want to back up the data on the external Hard Drive that is attached to the Time Capsule to the Tim Capsule using Time Machine.
Thanks for the clarification. Unfortunately, that will not work. You will need to connect the drive directly to your Mac if you want Time Machine to backup the drive to the Time Capsule.

Transfer from Time Capsule to External Disk

I want to start using an external drive (Lacie) for Time Machine, but need to transfer my Time Capsule backups to this external drive. I have archived the TC backups but that does not seem to be useful for this purpose. The instructions about restoring don't seem relevant either. I simply want to be able to access the older TC backups along with the newer backups on the external drive. In effect: to merge the old TM (made on the TC) with the new TM (made on the external drive).
If this is possible, how can I do it?
Thanks.

thomps2xxx wrote:
This works. I can now use TM to access the sparsebundle version of the backups on the new external drive.
But the new backups to this drive start a new file in a different format.
TM treats backups to locally attached drives differently over networked drives. here is an interesting read.
Is there any way to merge the sparsebundle files into the standard TM backup file?
unfortunately, the answer is no

Transfer from time capsule frozen - shows for part 15 hours: 2 min remaining transferring your applications folder...

Transfer from time capsule frozen - shows for part 15 hours: 2 min remaining transferring your applications folder...help!!!

Hang in there for another few hours to see if the transfer will complete. Check with the Apple guys again if no progress.
If you find that you need to repeat the process due to errors, I would strongly recommend an ethernet connection from the TC to the computer to greatly speed the process and minimize chances for errors and interruptions.

USB printing through Time Capsule from Ipad or iphone

I connected my printer thru the USB of my Time Capsule, and I can print wirelessly from my iMac, but my iPhone and my iPad do not see the printer. It has to be air printing enable or is there other way to do it?
Thanks!!

The bottom line here is the mobile devices use a different operating system than a Mac computer.
Hopefully, you are not asking us to explain other decisions that were made by Apple engineers and marketing folks. As you know from reading the Terms of Use Agreement for this area, we are all users here, just like you.
If you want to see specific features on a given product, I suggest that you contact Apple directly.
Apple - Feedback

Back up is very slow on 2 tb time capsule. After 2 days only 60 gb of 320 gb completed. Have connected ethernet cable. Any suggestions?

Back up is very slow on 2 tb time capsule. After 2 days only 60 gb of 320 gb completed. Have connected ethernet cable. Any suggestions?

Yes, that's terribly slow. You should get somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-24 GB/hour via Ethernet, assuming there isn't a lot of conflicting network traffic or your Mac's CPU is under very heavy load.
Are you sure you're actually using the Ethernet connection, instead of WIFI? To check, turn Airport off. If the backup fails, it's on WIFI. In that case, you need to set Ethernet as the "preferred" network, via System Preferences > Network. Click the "gear" icon at the bottom of the sidebar and select Set Service order. Then drag Ethernet above Airport. When both Airport and Ethernet are on, that will make OSX select Ethernet over Airport.
If that doesn't help, see #D2 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.

Slow Performance when using USB HD with Time Capsule

I have a 500 GB Time Capsule that I primarily use for network storage for 4 computers (3 Windows and a MacBook Pro). There is about 250 GB of data on the TC. After doing my research, I hooked up a 2 TB WD My Book to the TC USB port (after first reformatting the My Book using Mac OS Extended (Journaled). TC recognized the NAS HD just fine, but when I tried moving files from the TC to the My Book, it took FOREVER. 66 hrs to copy all 250 GB; 46 hours to move 60GB). I tried connecting the My Book directly to my MB Pro via USB and files moved quickly (15 minutes for 10GB). With the My Book connected to the MB Pro, I can access TC over Wifi and copy files directly onto the My Book in little time (again about 15 min for 10 GB). Any idea why the USB transfer rate between TC and the NAS is so slow? I have the most current TC firmware.

Jmiko wrote:
That thread is 5 years old
???? It's from three days ago. The electronic book it references was updated last year.
Plus that was talking about a 2002 Airport Extreme base station, whereas I have a 2009 Time Capsule.
As I mentioned above, the source I quoted is from last year. The thread I cited mentions nothing about
a particular year of base station. Where do you see that stuff?
As for my wifi connection, it seems very fast in all respects. As I mentioned, when I connect the external HD to my MacBook Pro and transfer files over my wifi from the Time Capsule, it boogies along. At any rate, I am not sure why the wifi would have an affect on the transfer rate of 2 disks connected by a USB cable.
My point was that, if that data has to travel over your Wi-Fi connection, the quality of that connection could affect the transfer speed you see. To investigate that possibility, I'd connect your Mac to the AirPort base station via Ethernet, turn your Mac's AirPort circuitry off, and repeat your tests that way.

Very slow transfer to Time Capsule (Ethernet)

I am trying to transfer 80 gb to my Time Capsule (Ethernet) but transfer is very slow (100 kb/s). How can I fix it?

Plug the TC into the Computer by ethernet and make sure the computer shows the link is running at gigabit.. if not replace the cable.
Turn off wireless.. there should be only one data path.. ethernet.
Turn IPv6 to link local only in the computer network setup for ethernet.

Slow reading speed on Time Capsule disk

I get terribly slow TC disk speed when measured with Black Magic tool using Wifi and even slower on Ethernet.
I get low speeds on Wifi but even lower speeds on Ethernet connection. See attached pics below.
Wifi:
My TC is on Wifi using N network and 5ghz and it seems the speed I get over the Wifi is reasonable. Based on Pondini blog, here are approximate speeds for USB, ethernet and Wifi:
http://pondini.org/TM/29.html
Pondini's figures don't seem to take into consideration a 5Ghz Wifi connection, which should be about 2x faster than 2.4ghz (144Mbps vs 300Mbps). So I am assuming the transfer would be around 20-40 GB per hour which was roughly what I experienced when doing testing using file transfers (and slightly below USB 2.0). TC will not operate on this maximum speed as there are other factors, such as overhead, internet connection and TC hardware itself.
It seems to be reasonable, it takes me about 4-6 hours to backup 100GB Time Machine backup. Is this amount of time normal? I assume yes.
Ethernet:
Recently I needed to restore a file from TimeMachine. I started to browse but the browsing using the TimeMachine app was horribly slow. So I thought using Ethernet cable instead of Wifi would make things better. No way. So I tested the speed of the hard drive using the Black Magic tool and below is what I get - the speed of Reading on Ethernet is much slower than Wifi.
If I interpret the numbers correctly, the Black Magic tool shows MB/s, in which case 11-15MB/s should be about 80-120 mbps, which is roughly the G speed on Wifi and roughly about 50% of the maximum speed of N network?
Are these calculations correct?
If these numbers are correct, the results are acceptable, as I would not expect the Time Capsule Hard Disk to reach the maximum speeds provided through the Ethernet or Wifi connection.
However, what concerns me is why is the reading speed through Ethernet so slow. It's only 3.5 MB/s.
Activity monitor is not much help, it's hard to figure out where is the issue.
My Setup:
MacBook 2012, Mavericks 10.9.4, Time Capsule 2012, Ethernet, Wifi N 5Ghz. No other machines or appliances active. Internet and network seems to operate fine, no issues.
This is ETHERNET:
THIS IS WIFI:

OSX:
Yes there are many issues with Mavericks, it almost feels like OSX 11.0 and not 10.9.5 from the bugginess. I can't speak for how the system is changing from inside but most of it doesn't affect me, so it's mostly the annoying things that pop up and the good things that just go away because Apple keep "dummy-fying" the OS.
I was considering downgrade to Snow Leopard couple of months back but it would not support the hardware. It wasn't so much editing the supported hardware list to installation but the drivers are missing for newer hardware in SL. I used to mess around with Windows but I am not ready to mess OSX yet. I still keep Snow Leopard on one of my machines and I always like to go back to it as it feels consistent and light.
Speed:
You found the reason.
1. Yes I turned off wireless and ethernet when testing one or the other.
2. Ethernet is 100baseTX and grayed out.. because..
3. I should have realized it's because I use USB ethernet Apple adapter. But given the USB has 480Mbs speed, after taking into account some overhead, the speed should still be higher than Wifi. Or maybe not.. I made assumption it should be fast enough so I didn't even consider that could be bottleneck on it's own.
TC:
If your TC is 2012 then it is Gen4.. .... recommend you downgrade the firmware to 7.6.1.....
Yes, I upgraded to latest firmware. Yes, it's TC Gen 4. By mistake, I didn't know there are issues. But soon I realized for instance Apple has removed the setting in Airport to force "N" radio for network only. To simplify things, you get now combined N, B, G whether you like it or now. Now things may interfere with your other networks and if you happen to use non-apple clients connecting to AirPort, you end up with hodge-podge N and B/G connectivity that slows down the network even more.
If Apple releases the BASH update, it probably needs to be upgraded anyways? I assume their software on Airport is also Unix / Linux flavour?

Slow as a snail Time Capsule - suggestions please?

I have been using a 1Tb Time Capsule for backing up about 600 Gb of mainly image information along with my main HD for a year or so without any major problems. The drive was full a long time ago but (as I understood it) when new material comes along the oldest backup info is deleted automatically. Yesterday for some reason (after a major Lightroom reshuffle) the backup routine stopped with a message saying "Your backup requires 300 Gb of space but you only have 250 GB (or along those lines).
In the end I erased all on the TC and started again. No problem except the transfer speed has slowed to a snail's pace. Calculating the speed at the moment it will take over 24 hours to backup 490 Gb. Is this correct? The TC is connected by regular ethernet cable, I have a MacPro 2 x 2.66 with 8Gb RAM and 3 internal hard drives. How can I speed up this process? Would I be better off with regular external hard drives connected by firewire?
How come I can download a Compact Flash card of 8 Gb in about 5 minutes and it takes half an hour or so fo the equivalent amount of data to backup on the TC? Thank you.

Colin Cadle wrote:
In the end I erased all on the TC and started again. No problem except the transfer speed has slowed to a snail's pace. Calculating the speed at the moment it will take over 24 hours to backup 490 Gb. Is this correct? The TC is connected by regular ethernet cable
Roughly, yes. It varies greatly, of course, and the first part of a full backup is considerably slower (since the Applications and System folders are the first to be backed-up, and contain hundreds of thousands of mostly very small files). But overall you should get, very roughly, 20-24 GB/hour via Ethernet.
There are a couple of things you can do that might speed it up. See #D2 in [Time Machine - Troubleshooting|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Troubleshooting.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of the +Time Machine+ forum).
Would I be better off with regular external hard drives connected by firewire?
Oh, yes! With F/W 400 expect roughly 50-55 GB/hour overall; F/W 800 80-85 GB/hour. For a laptop, the convenience of wireless backups is great, but for a desktop, it's a real drag, pardon the pun.
How come I can download a Compact Flash card of 8 Gb in about 5 minutes and it takes half an hour or so fo the equivalent amount of data to backup on the TC? Thank you.
There's a lot more to be done with a Time Machine backup than just copying files. They have a very complex structure, with things extensively linked together so Time Machine can do it's "magic" of only backing-up what's changed, but having each backup be a full one.

Extremely slow usb transfer/copy

My Macbook Air 13" medio 2011 copies extremely slow to usb.
I made a benchmark and got the following results:
System Info
Xbench Version
1.3
System Version
10.8.3 (12D78)
Physical RAM
4096 MB
Model
MacBookAir4,2
Drive Type
SanDisk Cruzer Blade
Disk Test
5.64
Sequential
7.54
Uncached Write
4.39
2.69 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write
4.61
2.61 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read
16.21
4.74 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read
41.74
20.98 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random
4.50
Uncached Write
13.94
1.48 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write
1.24
0.40 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read
553.36
3.92 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read
109.49
20.32 MB/sec [256K blocks]
When I bought the computer the usb transfer speed, was fast, but have become very slow over time.
I've tried to do a clean install of OSX but it has not helped

This is a know issue for last 2 years and there has been no response from Apple. I guess its time to ditch mac and install Ubuntu.

Accessing Lacie USB drive from Time Capsule

I have recently purchased a time capsule. I would like to transfer the contents of a LaCie 750G USB HD to the TC. I've plugged it into the USB connector of TC, and Disk Utility sees another HD (In Airport Utility, under 'Disks' it sees the USB drive as a Hitachi HDT721075SLA380). However, I cannot see this disk when accessing TC through Finder on my MacBook.
Is there an easy way to copy the contents of the LaCie to the TC?

Couple of thoughts:
The Time Capsule's USB port would be a lot happier to see a drive format of Mac OS Extended (Journaled), although FAT 32 may work if you don't exceed a 4 GB file size.
Although the message says it will take 7 hours, did you actually make a copy to confirm this? If you did not, the only way to will know if it will really take that long is to make the copy. It could be much less.
If you don't already have any valuable data on the disk, I would suggest that you re-format it using MAC OS Extended (Journaled). Might also be a good idea to Verify Disk and Repair Permissions if indicated using Disk Utility.

SLOW shutdown due to Time Capsule

Ever since I've set Time Capsule as the backup volume, Logout/Shutdown is taking like 5 minutes to complete.
When I'm not connected to the network, or on a network that my Time Capsule isn't connected, everything but the desktop picture would disappear, but then it would stay in that state for about 5 minutes, and then finally shut down.
(By the way, when I'm connected to the network with Time Capsule, it would recover space on my FileVaulted home folder, perform a backup, and then shutdown as usual)
I do have FileVault turned on, which backsup the home folder on logout or shutdown... but doesn't Snow Leopard know that the Time Capsule doesn't exist?
I'm absolutely sure it's due to the Time Capsule + FileVault combination, because turning off Time Machine or choosing my old USB HD for backup doesn't cause the shutdown process to slow down.
Is there anyway around this problem?
It's quite annoying when I need to get going quickly but the Mac seems to never shutdown.

Yoshihide K. wrote:
I'm absolutely sure it's due to the Time Capsule + FileVault combination, because turning off Time Machine or choosing my old USB HD for backup doesn't cause the shutdown process to slow down.
Is there anyway around this problem?
Probably not, as long as you're using FileVault. You're stuck with Time Machine trying extra hard to back up your home folder, since it can't do it while you're signed-on.
Let me ask you this: do you really need to have your entire home folder encrypted? All your preferences, settings, emails, photos, and videos? Even all your documents?
That also prevents you from browsing or restoring individual items, which is one of the main features of Time Machine.
What a number of folks do instead is make an encrypted disk image via Disk Utility, and put their sensitive documents there. Then all changes can be backed-up hourly, and individual items (except those in the encrypted disk image) can be browsed and restored from your backups.

Slow USB transfer to Time Capsule

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