Archiving a Time Capsule

On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 3:23 AM, Scott Wyant <swyantgmail.com> wrote:
>
> I am trying to archive a TimeCapsule to an external drive, using the
> new archive function built into the latest Airport Utility update.
> One terabyte TC, with about 200 gb free, archiving to a Western
> Digital 1TB drive, to be used for off-site archiving. I have two such
> drives, and intended to archive on Thurs. night, then swapping drives
> on Fri. so as to have an offsite backup.
>
> Archive starts off fine, transferring about 1gb per minute for the
> first hour or so, and then SLOWWWWWS down. After 30 hours, I've got
> about 240 GB transferred. During the archiving, TimeCapsule
> (logically) refuses to accept TimeMachine backups from the office
> workstations, which is freaking everyone out.
>
> Apple help line had literally never talked to anyone before who was
> attempting this. I found one person on a Mac forum who suggested
> turning off Spotlight on the server, which I have done though I'm not
> sure why this will make any difference.
>
> If anyone has tried this, or knows more about it than I do (which
> isn't difficult), please weigh in.
>


I do much the same thing (although less often and only one drive, so
there are times when my offsite backup is onsite (which is wrong, but
I have offsite bootable clones as well, so only the history is at
risk).

I don't see anything like the slowdown you see...but I also have only
about 400 gig in the TimeCapsule. And while my offsite drive is
offsite, the credit card slip says it is Western Digital (but it
doesn't say which MyBook model it is).

My backups run about 7.5 hours.

  --John

It could simply be a bad hard disk or just bad blocks on the disk. Do you have the same problem on both of your external drives or just one of them? If the latter, try reformatting (do a full reformat) of the bad drive. If it's just bad blocks they should be marked as such by the reformat and your problem should go away. Otherwise, no idea what is wrong.

>
>I am trying to archive a TimeCapsule to an external drive, using the
>new archive function built into the latest Airport Utility update.
>One terabyte TC, with about 200 gb free, archiving to a Western
>Digital 1TB drive, to be used for off-site archiving. I have two such
>drives, and intended to archive on Thurs. night, then swapping drives
>on Fri. so as to have an offsite backup.
>
>Archive starts off fine, transferring about 1gb per minute for the
>first hour or so, and then SLOWWWWWS down. After 30 hours, I've got
>about 240 GB transferred. During the archiving,

This looks like an OS X problem. The OS allocates a finite amount of
physical memory to manage the file directory. When the file directory
exceeds this size, the manager of this memory goes into "virtual"
mode. Each need for additional memory is met by releasing unused
memory. Each time a file is opened the directory tree must be read,
generating needs for memory to hold data that was in previously
released memory. (Thrashing ?) The Activity Monitor utility will give
a hint of this. In defense of OS X, your application continues to
work, albeit, slowly, not just terminate.