Time Capsule Backups
Recently I got myself a Time Capsule to give me and the people around me a more effortless backup experience. Unfortunately I found backups sometimes to take quite long.
Especially on the hourly backup cycle it feels like constant backups. Occasionally I have seen “Finishing backup” for more than an hour.
It might actually be related to my terrible signal of the Time Capsule. Seems like I need to give Apple Support a call. (*sigh*) On 5Ghz n-only I am not getting a full signal standing 4 meters away from it. I can barely leave the room. Or it shows full reception and as soon as I try to access the web it just drops the connection. On 2Ghz n-only it seems both the Airport Express and the LinkedSys WRT54g still give better reception than the Time Capsule. It seems the g/n mode works best for me while I really hoped for the 5Ghz multi-channel speed. Buy anyway!
I was curious what acutally gets backed up to see why it really takes so long. I found this command line tool extremely useful.
tms snaphots tms delta 12 11
You first can list the available backup snapshots and then get a delta of what files have been saved. If you are also annoyed by the limited Time Machine preferences you might want to give the Time Machine Editor a try. It lets you adjust the backup schedule to something a little more sensible.