Alternatively, you could plug your Mac into the Airport Extreme/Time Capsule via ethernet. That way (assuming you have enough ethernet cables) you could do a faster initial backup of up to 3 Macs at once instead of one at a time.

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the problem with this option is that it will actually be SLOWER over ethernet than directly to USB. This isn't because USB is faster than gigabit ethernet, it's because when doing a backup over ethernet, you are using the airport extreme's very weak processor to write data to the USB drive. Over gigabit ethernet, you'll only get around 4-5 Mbps top speed, which is actually only slightly faster than doing it over 802.11n wireless. So as you'll see, to do an initial backup this way is *much* faster as the hint suggests.

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4 - 5Mbs ????

I just checked mine, and I can get a solid 38Mbs over wireless (802.11n with a lot of walls), and 78Mbs over 100Mbs ethernet going to an AirPort Disk - you may want to look though your settings or get something replaced.

I don't argue that it will be faster directly connected through USB though.

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I had set up my computer to perform the initial backup over wired gigabit ethernet to my Airport Extreme. After about 15 hours of backing up, it had managed to copy about 50GB of data. I aborted that run, wiped the disk and started the backup directly connected and it finished about 170GB overnight, definitely less the 10 hours. While I was watching the network backup with dtrace I saw that there seemed to be significant overhead in copying small files.

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