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I have a Time Capsule and am going to do a restore to a new Mac I bought. Instead of doing this restore over ethernet (or wifi [shudder]) is there any way to do the restore over USB from the Mac to the Time Capsule? I imagine that would be the fastest way if possible.

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If you plug a USB drive into the Time Capsule, you can go into the disks section of Airport Utility and tell Time Capsule to archive its internal disk onto the USB drive. You could then plug the USB drive into your Mac and restore from that.

I wouldn't recommend it, however. You'd need to do a complete copy of everything on your Time Capsule - which includes old backups that won't be needed for the restore. By the time you've done the archive and restored over USB, you could probably have restored over the network - especially if you plug in and use gigabit ethernet - and the network is far more straight forwards and convenient.

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Thanks! Now to find out if any of my network cables are Cat 5e or 6 ;) – Craig Tataryn Sep 13 '10 at 20:23
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I'd like to point out that Gigabit Ethernet is 1000mbps, whereas USB 2.0 hi-speed is only 480mbps. Sure, doing TCP/IP over GigE has more overhead than disk transactions over USB, but I'd still expect an isolated GigE to be faster than USB. Also, GigE only requires plain Cat 5, just like good ol' 100BASE-TX did. – Spiff Sep 14 '10 at 9:07
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