 So listener Brian asks, he says, I'm 1200 miles away from my daughter who asked me to help her set up her Wi-Fi in her new apartment. I went for simplicity and because the apartment is small, sent her an ERO Pro 6 as a router. She has Comcast and we got the router set up fairly easily. She had her old 802.11N, the airport extreme. So I suggested that she set that up in bridge mode, cable it via ethernet to the ERO and use it as a time machine destination, so far so good. I tried to have her use the old system of speeding up the backup, start the backup over Wi-Fi and give it some time, then move the time machine hard drive to the laptop and let it finish there, then move the drive back to the airport extreme. We ran into some problems with that though. So I told her to just leave the time machine drive on the airport extreme and let time machine do its job over Wi-Fi. My question is, could I achieve similar speed up by attaching the laptop to the airport extreme via ethernet cable? And what I need to turn off Wi-Fi on the laptop to force it to send the data over ethernet or change the order of networks and network system preferences to make ethernet the prime data connection. She and her roommate have a total of three MacBook Pros, some old, some fairly new with substantial numbers of files. So any backup time saved would be much appreciated. Yeah, so I don't know that I ever had any success moving a backup from a time capsules type setup or an airport extreme setup, moving a drive from that to a direct attached. The format of the way it saves files is remarkably different. If you do it over a network, it saves to a sparse bundle. If you do it to a direct attached drive, it just puts it in a folder structure. So I don't know that I've ever heard of that. I may be the one out of touch here. That's totally possible, but I've never heard of that before. What I have heard of is the other thing that you suggested and that is exactly connecting via ethernet as far as making sure it go. And yes, I think that will work just fine. In fact, there's no reason to even start it over Wi-Fi. You can just start it over ethernet. It's a network backup either way. Time machine probably doesn't even know that it's running over Wi-Fi versus ethernet. It knows that it's sending it over the network and the operating system takes care of the nitty gritty. So I think starting it over ethernet would be good. Turning off Wi-Fi certainly is the safe way, especially from 1200 miles away, to ensure that it is using the ethernet connection. But you're right, if you set the network service order, and I highly recommend that we all do this unless you have some specific reason not to. If you're in a scenario where you could use ethernet or Wi-Fi sort of interchangeably, especially with a laptop, when you connect to ethernet for the first time, set that as the top connection. In fact, I do that on my IMAX here, which are all ethernetted in, Wi-Fi is the secondary connection. And when I say secondary, I mean, go into system preferences, go into network, and then do, there's a little, well it used to be a settings gear, but now it's a little dot, dot, dot gear at the bottom of the list of devices and choose set service order and make your ethernet connection live above your Wi-Fi connection. That way, if they're both happened to be connected, you'll only send data, or you'll primarily send data over ethernet if they're on the same network. If they're on different networks, then you're max even smart enough to be able to do that. So for example, if I'm testing a new router and configuring a router, I can leave my ethernet connected so that my IMAX gets connected to the internet, it's at the top, but I connect to the other router with Wi-Fi and because it's different IP addresses, I can put either one into my browser and it knows where to go because it knows and that's the beauty of TCP IP. So yeah, put it as the first one, you should be fine. I think it'd be in good shape. And then if the ethernet connection happens to drop out, it'll fall back to Wi-Fi. And if you plug ethernet in, it'll jump back up to ethernet. Like this is how that works. And it works fairly smoothly. Like I said, this is not Apple's magic per se. This is TCP IP being implemented the way it was built to be implemented. So it is, I mean, there's a lot of Apple magic in there, but they're just following the protocol.