As far as backup strategies go, Time Machine is a pretty good addition to your backup strategy. You get hourly backups, can go back and retrieve accidentally-deleted files and can even restore your system from it. At both home and work, I use it as part of my backup strategy, filling in the spaces between regular clones of my system. In fact, the only thing I dislike about Time Machine is how long it takes to create its initial backup if you’re backing up to a shared drive over a network.

Recently, I took the opportunity to centralize the majority of my storage in my home to drives attached to an older MacBook Pro. As part of this project (which is the topic of a different article down the road), I put a 2.0TB drive in an older USB 2.0 miniStack, and wanted to use this as the Time Machine drive for my current MBP. The problem was that—regardless of whether I connected to that drive via WiFi or via Ethernet—Time Machine kept telling me that a backup of the approximately 250GB would take around a week or more to make.

Obviously, this was not acceptable.

Drawing from various sources on the Internet (where, apparently, there are a large number of people with similar complaints), I was able to paste together a solution that enabled me to get Time Machine’s initial backup time to reduce from over a week to just under two hours.

Note: I performed these steps in OS X 10.8.3; while this certainly should be possible with earlier (and I would assume later) versions of OS X, your mileage may vary. Article Continues…