Time Capsule ‘Hang’ Restore Problem & Backup Issues
I recently had a kind of bad experience with having to do a Restore from a Time Capsule. It was very frustrating, so I thought I’d post about this problem.
Following Apple’s instructions exactly, I booted up from a Leopard Installer Disk, chose the “Restore from Time Machine backup” Utility…etc, and so far so good. It seemed to be about to let me Restore from my wireless backup on Time Capsule. The process started with the first few screens and seemed fine. Then trouble. Just before the final, crucial last step “Restore From Time Capsule” the computer seemed to HANG FOREVER, and stayed like that for a long time, saying it was “calculating disk space”. I waited. And waited. And waited (20, 30, 45 minutes…) It still wasn’t done “Calculating”. I Google’d and saw a number of posts from others about this exact same thing happening to them too. Or that it finally after about 2 hours, said something like “Ready to Restore. Estimated time to restore: 37 Hours”!
So Restoring wireless via Time Capsule is an issue, especially if you have a fair amount of data (more than 20-30GB). And I wasn’t even trying to do this Wirelessly, I was actually plugged into the house network via Ethernet cable hoping this would speed things up.
So for me, the End Result is that while In Theory, Time Capsule “works” as advertised as a wireless backup system (which it does) when push really comes to shove and you really NEED TO RESTORE your computer entirely from that backup I find Time Capsule has a number of issues. Mainly that it takes way too long even to figure out how long it will take (!) So I can’t feel T.C. is 100% trustworthy, currently. Maybe this will improve in Snow Leopard and next version….
The fix around this problem so I could do the Restore on my clients iMac?
I followed others advice after some Googling: Wipe the drive and install Leopard; Setup a dummy TEMP user account; THEN you use Migration Assistant to get the data from the Time Capsule/Time Machine backup. This worked fast and Time Machine worked fine exactly as advertised restoring the drive to the last backup.
All I can say is come on Apple! Fix this issue with Time Capsule. The Moral of this story? For Time Machine backup – which I actually do love as a backup system for almost all my clients, I will now recommend using a local drive (an external hard drive). It just works. Drives are really cheap now. You can get a 1TB USB drive for under a hundred bucks, and a 500gb one for $65. Thats cheap, sure protection, and especially if you ever need to Restore your Mac will speed up the process over wireless (“37 hours to Restore”) and keep you cooler under the collar. Or at least, Time Capsule doing wireless backup BUT having an external drive also in addition. Your computer data (and sanity) are just too important, so to be extra safe, backup wired to a drive. And don’t wait long between backups. If you don’t keep your drive attached and on all the time, then do it at least once/week or every other week, more often if you make many important changes.
I can not tell you how many intelligent people do not backup their computer and how many disasters I’ve seen because of this.
Just do it.
1 Comment
Agree entirely. The TC is a train wreck of a device. Time Capsule is great but Apple should be ashamed for selling the device to a loyal customer base that buys Apple by default because it “does what you need out of the box”. It is a modest wireless router with a modest hard drive attached and NO ability to clone the drive. So, if you need to fix the HD (as we did recently) you can’t extract data from the TC and continue with life. Maybe Apple will take the criticism to heart and actually start selling a drive that does what it implies it does and – more importantly – what people need it to do. Then this “one box” solution might be worth the money. At the moment however the best part of it comes with the OS and you are better off buying a more functional drive on the open market.