Backup Needs More Room After Update to Mavericks

Manually thinning backups is extremely risky.. I would not recommend.

See Q12 here is you want to try. http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html

You can archive off the old backups to a USB drive plugged into the TC.. this is a long slow process.. but it will give you a full copy of the existing backup.

You can then erase the TC and start over. This is a good way to go.

Or you can just use the USB drive plugged into the TC as targe.. it is very slow but after the first backup and over wireless is not much more hindrance than wireless itself is.

Plug in a HFS+ formatted USB drive of adequate size to hold all the files on the TC.

Open the airport utility and go to the disk tab.. click archive.

The RED box one.

That will then do the archive.

seems like it would be faster just to plug the drive into my MacBook, and copy the data folder through the Mac.

True .. about half the time.. but the TC will happily back itself up overnight without needing your Mac running. And you may find backup of TM sparsebundle over ethernet is still slow due to the very small file sizes involved.

but why does it take so bloody long? its showing 20+ hours to archive 600GB ... It doesn't take that long to copy a disk connected to my Mac, so what's the slow bottleneck here?

Backup is about 30GB/hr over USB due to the huge number of very small files. It takes what it takes.. start it up and let it do its stuff.

Thanks. Silly thing is once I was connected via wifi and it showed up,

Yes, the new v6 airport utility behaves differently to the v5 you are used to in Snow Leopard.

It does not detect the TC over ethernet unless you force it to.

And it is not even logical.

In the airport utility click on the top left corner item.. other wi-fi devices.

Lo and behold .. there is an option to select ethernet. So it seems ethernet is now one of those other wifi devices. How would you ever guess that?? I stumbled on it by accident.. but there is another way and that is to simply force the connection manually. Make sure you have IPv6 set correctly to link-local only.. this is really important.

Click on the main menu and configure other.

And supply the IP address. Also type your admin password to access the TC.. No password is necessary after a reset.

I guess this is because Apple is now leaving ethernet ports out of its latest range of Laptops.. so it is highly dependent on wireless for everything. It is hard to think of a more stupid thing to do. There are half height ethernet ports available in the ultrabook PC range.. I see no reason Apple needed to drop it.

I'm doing a full backup by ethernet right now and moved 4.18GB in 00:09:32 or 26.3GB an hour. Is this within the realm of the 30GB margin of error or do cables make a difference? I notice now the cable says only Cat 5. No telling how old it is. Maybe I should have hooked up that Cat 6 sitting on my desk? Does it really make a difference on a 6' run?

Check that you are connected at gigabit speed.. this is easy.. in your Mac open the Network preferences.. do the last tab of advanced.. check the connection.

Does it say 1000baseT.. then you have gigabit.. makes no difference for the cable.. if it shows 100baseT you are on a poor cable.

To get the full benefit of gigabit make sure the wireless is turned off.. many people have both running. If wireless is above ethernet in the preferences for connection it will get used before ethernet does.

This is wrong.. But even having both ethernet and wireless active.. with ethernet as the preferred option can still slow down the link in my experience. So turn wireless off.

It can be very slow doing the backup as the many small files are written to the file tables of the TC.. there is nothing you can really do.. wait it out.

But then do a test with a single file of very large size.. say 1GB video file.. and see what speed you get.. use activity monitor.. you should achieve something like 60MB/s over gigabit writing to the TC.. but don't be surprised if it is 30-40.. Just the same it proves gigabit because on a 100mbit link you would only manage 10MB/s.

An archive will happen and continue to complete once started without the Mac being turned on.

If the backup drive is not formatted to be a time capsule, and indeed contains other files, how exactly do I use this archived file if I need it?

It is formatted standard HFS+ and that is the same as the TC. There is no such thing as a special format to be a TC.. TC is formatted HFS+. So the USB disk and the TC have the same format.. the files on the TC are dumped onto the archive disk as is. You use an archived file exactly as you would the same file on the TC. This is simple and obvious for files.. it may not be so obvious for TM backups.

Your TM backup exists as a sparsebundle on the TC. It is copied to the TC in exactly the same way. You open it as you would expect to open a different sparsebundle. Use Pondini's restore info. Q14-17 here. http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html

It makes no difference if you have a TC disk or an archive disk plugged into the TC or directly into your computer.

Does the time capsule directly extract and restore from the archive?

No, the TC is a dumb as a board hard disk in a router.. it has no brains.. you need to remember that.

You cannot restore files to the TC from an Archive.. for the very simple reason.. Apple didn't bother to give a restore button.

Since the TC has no brains.. use yours.. how would you restore your files.. from archive to the TC..

well you plug the archive disk into your computer.. you copy the files to the TC disk.

Taint hard.

I learned a lot from this. Last night's backup was at 22MB/sec. I checked and saw WiFi was preferred over Ethernet so it seems the back up took place wirelessly despite my cable. And the slow speed lead me to question the cable last night.

I did the test you suggested with a 2.4GB movie (m4a) and got between 38 and 56 MB/sec on disk tab of Activity monitor. Overall speed 41 MB/sec. Something may be goofy there I think because I am at 1000BaseT and write time was the about the same copying the file from a USB 2.0 drive and my SSD. For kicks I tried the same test on a Cat 6 cable and it made no difference like you said it wouldn't.

But I know Ethernet is superior to wireless ac by a factor of two with that movie file (m4a) and when I backed up my wife's MacBook Pro tonight via Ethernet I got 56 MB/sec even with the wireless on.

I never did figure out how to use activity monitor for time of transfer or overall transfer speed. I thought the absence of that ability was just a OS X characteristic. So I used a stop watch to get my overall speeds. Not exactly a precise method to be sure. How do you use the activity monitor for the overall, if it is possible?

No luck with overall speed .. activity monitor is just that.. but the graphs give you a pretty good idea.. mind you they destroyed the graphs in Mavericks.. they are much better in the older versions. I am sure there are utilities that will give you speed over the network with averages.. but for what you are doing you are really trying to spot a problem and I think the graphs on activity monitor work well enough for me.