Thanks for all the comments, questions and advice. I’ve actually managed to complete a full back up!
I posted onto the Netgear community forum and one of the hypotheses that came back was that it resolving the issue could be by putting in a gigabit switch. I picked one up, plugged it in and didn’t see any improvement in speeds (in fact it was estimating slightly more time to complete of 4 days). At that stage transfer speed remained at about 10 minutes per gig. Exasperated, I decided before heading to bed to set my sleep function to “never” and simply let my mac run 4 days straight.
When I woke up something had happened: the progress bar had zorched ahead and was estimating 4 hours left to complete the backup and it was taking about 75 seconds to backup a gig. No idea why this happened, but for once it was good news. The machine’s now fully backed up.
whsbuss, in answer to your question, the N300 WNR2000v2 isn’t a GB router, but I *think* the gigabit switch works, as it effects the transfer directly between the NAS and the mac. In any event, speeds were certainly orders of magnitude better once the switch was in place.
