Hey Mac users…
Being a Mac user, I bought an Airport Extreme for my backup duties; assuming that it would seamlessly integrate with the Time Machine. I have setup the Airport to work over my wireless network.
Everything seemed to be OK. Time Machine was doing it job, and Airport was busy. The problem is, both were busy for months and my backup was never really finished. Every time Time Machine started, it was backing up stuff, indexing backup, finishing backup, or making backup ready. Whenever I entered the Time Machine, I couldn’t see any finished backups; and whenever I peeked into my Airport Drive, I saw one incomplete backup file.
This made me feel unsafe, as if I don’t have any backups at all. I googled about it, and found out that many people had similar problems.
Being the computer wizard I am ;P , I have designed a very simple but effective solution, which solved my problem and caused backups to work properly. I have simply disabled wireless access on my Airport, enabled LAN access, and connected my Airport drive to my Mac with a regular network cable.
I think that the huge backup and indexing requirements of my Mac simply required too much data flow. In my case, wireless is initially slower than LAN anyway. On top of that; I am busy on the Internet whenever Time Machine gets the chance to run a backup – meaning, I kept my wireless network busy. When those two factors merge; Time Machine and Airport didn’t have enough bandwidth to run the backup procedure as they should.
Disabling Airport’s wireless capabilities and making the connection over the LAN cable not only provided a faster data transfer rate; it also provided Time Machine a free bandwidth to share data.
This simple solution worked like a charm; and the backup which couldn’t be finished since months was finished in a couple of hours – while I was playing World of Warcraft! So I didn’t even notice; I just checked and the backup was over 😉
I am sharing this, hoping that others might find this solution useful.
Dr. Kerem Koseoglu 
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