My wife got me an Apple Time Capsule for father’s day.
The Time Capsule is a network device that is supposed to work in conjunction with Apple’s Time Machine backup software to backup your computer wirelessly on a regular basis. It also serves as a 802.11n access point that I’ve been using to provide access to our laptops.
Ever since I first installed it I’ve had problems with Time Machine not working very well. I hooked up my laptop via ethernet for the initial backup (which is large) and then switched to 802.11n for the incremental backups. However the incremental backups never seemed to be working correctly. It would spend hours just trying to start the backup (“Preparing” stage), and then an equally long time doing a relatively small backup.
Finally, yesterday my wife told me that that our slingplayer wasn’t working at all with her laptop in the bedroom.
Sure enough, despite having a strong wifi signal I was seeing a large number of packets dropped. In fact, I was seeing these when I was quite near the Time Capsule.
Could this be the problem with my Time Machine backups as well?
After a lot of troubleshooting I ended up doing a hard reset. (Unplug the power cable and plug it back in while holding down the reset button). This completely resets the firmware settings, but doesn’t affect the harddrive (or the backups on them).
I then reconfigured the Time Machine the way I needed it.
Since then it appears to be working much better. I’m not seeing packet loss, the backups seem to be working and the slingplayer is working.
Hopefully this does the trick.
Tags: Apple, Time Capsule, Time Machine