Davethehiker Loc: South West Pennsylvania

I bought an 8TB (16 TB RAID) “My cloud home Duo” hard drive to back my Apple Mac Book Pro using “Time Machine”. I backed 2.55 TB wirelessly over my home LAN, but it took five full days running day and night! I think I could have done this a lot faster if I had connected my computer directly to the external HD but I’m not sure how to do this. I have short cable with a male Thunderbolt connection on one end and a female Ethernet connection on the other. I also have an Ethernet cable with male connections on both ends. This should take care of the wiring because I could run a signal directly from the computer to the HDs, eliminating the router and my home LAN.

What I’m not sure how to do is how to now set up Time Machine to recognize the backed up data now that it’s backed up when I connect directly with an Ethernet cable. Can I go into Time Machine Preference and add another backup disk just for the hard wired connection, even tho it’s the same data created over my LAN? Is Time Machine smart enough know that this is my back-up data and start using it, even though the path to is now hardwired, not over my LAN.

I don’t to take a chance on damaging the back-up that took me so long to make.

Thanks in advance for any guidance you can provide.

Dngallagher Loc: Wilmington De.

Not familiar with how TM operates over wifi, however, as long as the volumes are accessed the same, wired or wifi it should be fine. Just like use of multiple drives used via USB, OS X should keep track of the TM volume.

You may need a crossover ethernet cable or a little mini switch/hub to get things connected, depending on the hardware.

I would think the worst case is that the TM is NOT detected once hardwired, and you can go back to wifi without losing anything.

Davethehiker Loc: South West Pennsylvania

Thanks for the reply. I found a place on Internet that claims it can done. It's that "crossover ethernet cable" that worries me.

I'm planning on buying a new fully loaded Apple Mac Book Pro computer and backing everything on a HD. A hardwired connection would speed things up.

Dngallagher Loc: Wilmington De.

A crossover is just a cable with a connection pair reversed to allow send/receive...it is a common item... in the case a crossover is needed, but not available an ethernet hub or switch does the job to communicate. You can also obtain a crossover adapter these days. Many devices will also handle crossover automatically, so it is worth a shot just plugging in if it does not work, a crossover device is easy to add.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_crossover_cable

Hard wired is faster than wifi in most cases, depending on your lan.

Davethehiker Loc: South West Pennsylvania

Thank you once more. I just placed an order for an ethernet crossover adapter, just in case I need one. I alrady have a thunderbolt to ethernet converter that plugs into my Apple computer. I'm not sure if my ethernet cable is cross over or not but with adapter I just ordered I should be covered.

Dngallagher Loc: Wilmington De.

Good deal! Hope all is as simple as I think it will be.