Data Transfer - Airport Capsule to MacBook Pro

1 No you cannot use USB directly..

You can plug a USB hard disk of equal size to the TC disk and run an archive. That can then be plugged into the Mac.

2 You will need to buy a Thunderbolt to Ethernet adapter.. well worth it.

3 No.. it will likely mess everything up.. even if you do the transfer correctly it will just crash out.

However keep a track of actual data copying.. and if it has stalled or running exceedingly slowly, then just stop it.. and setup again using either USB hard disk as mentioned under point 1, or using ethernet.

My wife has been waiting for over a week to use her laptops but the Big Sur installation didn’t go as planned and it’s taking longer than expected.

Updates .. and especially a really big one like Big Sur which is really huge and dramatically different.. this is after all not a point increase this is OS XI then extra care is needed.

A point for future.. or others reading.. never trust Time Machine.

Before you start any big upgrade create a bootable clone of your computer drive to USB disk which needs to be same or larger in size to your boot drive and preferably SSD or at least a fast USB not a portable slow drive.

There are a number of tools available for this but one we recommend around here is Carbon Copy Cloner.