It’s official: Apple’s Time Capsule sucks. I now own a $500 rock.
In concept, Apple's Time Capsule seems like a great product. For the first few days, it seemed to work great. Eventually, however, it started randomly disconnecting me every 5 seconds. Aside from generating a cool effect of Adium popping up and down rapidly, it was extremely frustrating. My only solution was to restart the Time Capsule.
So the disconnects happen about once a week now, sometimes twice. I could live with that, no big deal.
Tonight, however, Time Machine goes about its hourly backups just fine. I closed the lid on my MacBook Pro for a bit to go do something, popped it back open, and it seemed to continue the backup. A few seconds later, however, I get an error stating it had connection trouble with the Time Capsule disk that resulted in the backup failing. This was about two hours ago.
Since then, it's been stuck at 'Preparing Backup...'. I'm smelling a failure. I tried restarting the laptop, restarting the Time Capsule itself, and even performed the EFI Firmware update. Still get nothing. Still 'Preparing Backup...'.
Update: So I just did a forced backup on Ashley's MacBook, and all seems fine - is backing up just nicely.
Any ideas for my crippled MacBook Pro + Time Capsule?
6 Comments
I just got a new TB TimeCapsule - and messed with it for 2 days trying over and over to get it out of the "preparing backup" mode.
I downloaded a new copy of TIME MACHINE AND AIRPORT UTILITY V1.0 and that solved the problem for me.
Available at
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/timemachineandairportupdatesv10.html
Robert - thanks for the tip. I'm pretty sure I have the latest update, but I can't tell. The version number on my AirPort Utility is 5.3.1 (531.9). Could you tell me the version number of the software download you used?
I installed the Time Machine and Airport Utility update that came with the Time Capsule. I also think there was an automatic software update after I had purchased it.
After fiddling quite a bit with an airport express base station (n) with the latest firmware and airport utility i've come to the conclusion that the problem is most like the Airport Utility version 5.3.1 software itself. This application generates corrupted configuration files or *something* and gives the hardware a bad rep.
I did extensive research on a problem with PPPOE config that one day after i updated firmware and airport utility started acting up. Ultimately I found that the airport base station simply cannot accept that PPPOE is being handled externally and that it should only use ethernet (the modem is handling pppoe as is typical). This standard set up used to work but not long after updating to airport utility 5.3.1 it essentially became "stuck" in pppoe mode.
I believe it's the software rather than hardware for two reasons, one the hardware worked without this issue for some time before the update and second the hard reset did not resolve the issue. This is a software problem and it's probably the airport utility itself, which I've always thought sucked anyway.
Ultimately to solve my problem for those who are interested i had to bow to the wishes of the apple hardware/software and actually allow the AEBS to perform the pppoe auth. In addition I needed to change the ip range on the AEBS due to collisions with the default 192.168.1.64 modem ip (i switched to 192.168.2. range for dhcp)
lousy,
Thanks for the detailed explanation and tips!
Nick
i thought all apple stuff was supposed to be plug and play and never have any problems?...
Yep, Time Capsule really is a disappointment. It seems like it backs up fine if I don't do anything while it's backing up, but if I have some applications open and actually trying to do something with my laptop while it's upgrade the thing just sits there a "prepares" forever. And no, it's not the case that it has a lot of backups to do or anything. I just did a backup an hour ago and it was fine. Little if nothing has changed on the system so it should "prepare" for about 30 seconds and then be done. I wrote my own backup script using RSYNC script that I was running manually before I bought the Time Capsule. My 1 line script worked better and was more reliable than this joke of a backup system apple has created. For laptops, Time Capsule is a joke. Your right, it's basically useless.
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