Copy Speed ?

[hsaphoto]

I did a backup of my MacBookPro (about 60 gig) on a LaCie firewire portable drive (120 gig) in about 1.5 hours (I did not check the write speed) but it seamed reasonable.

Now I just started the backup of my startup drive (200gig) on my G5 tower to an external FW drive, and the copy speed is around 7Mb/sec, at this rate we’re looking at more that 9 hours !!! It seams way too long, any hints ??

Thanks

Hsaphoto

[sdsl]

I think it probably said 7 MB/s (not Mb/s). That being the case, it comes out to roughly 1/2 GB per minute, or 30 GB per hour. That seems a bit slow, but I have noticed these speeds varying by factors of x2 to x3 during a backup -- maybe copying lots of small files is less efficient and that's when you see the slower speeds. Also, if you have other processes running on your computer, they will slow down superduper by significant factors, depending on what they are.

30 GB/hr will not be 9 hrs for your backup. If your disk were totally full, it would be close to that, but I'm guessing your disk is ~ 1/2 full, which would mean 4-5 hrs. Also, the rate will increase due to the factor I mentioned above so I'd expect maybe 2 hrs is what you can realistically expect. No way to really know until you let it finish (did you?).

By the way, these are quite consistent with what you saw with your 60-GB backup. While the initial backup can take a few hours for a large disk, the subsequent smart updates are typically 5 to 30 minutes (depending on how much has changed since the last backup). AT least that's been my experience.