As my British friend,
Darren Rolfe, would say, I’ve been “under the Kosh” this week but things are getting back to normal. Set up of the Time Capsule was extremely easy. This was true even in light of the fact that I was setting up a dual wireless network to accommodate the various “N” and “G” devices in our house. I simply followed the new Airport Utility software’s built in menus and was done in 10 minutes.

I set up my wife’s MacBook first since it was the machine most desperately in need of a backup. I didn’t tell her exactly what I was up to but told her not to close the lid for the day. When I got home from work it was done. I then set my MacBook Pro to do the same over night and it got about halfway the first night. I then “stopped” the backup and took it to the office. The second night I resumed the backup but when I woke up this morning the backup window looked a bit wonky. It showed the status but didn’t seem to pick up on the 70 gigs backed up the night before. I should have taken a screenshot. Anyway, tonight I tried to resume it and Time Machine gave me the “Preparing” bar for about 2 hours. According to the web it was trying to sort itself out but I got impatient so I just hooked it up to the ethernet cable directly to the Time Capsule and told it to start over. Using the ethernet cable it just uploaded its first 10 gigs in 45 minutes. At this rate it will not be done by the time I need to leave for work tomorrow so I may be doing this again.

Other than the difficulty getting the first sync on my big MacBookPro drive it seems to be working great on my wife’s MacBook. The incremental backups don’t seem to noticeably slow things down (granted none of them are very big) and it provides that seemless wireless Time Machine I was hoping for. I’ll be putting together a more detailed review for Surfbits this weekend.