Is this a reasonable back up speed?

[Bagelturf]

I recently did a back up that took 11 hours -- much slower than I would have expected given my experience on Tiger.

Here is the info:
iMac 2.16 GHz Intel
260GB backed up
1.2M files
Destination is sparse disk image (encrypted 128bit) on 400MB FW drive

I did a smart update to an empty sparse image.

Does 11 hours seem reasonable? Would it have gone faster with a full back up?

[dnanian]

Hard to say, actually... but we're really not significantly slower in our operation under Leopard: the only real "change" from a performance perspective would be that ACLs are being copied in the vast majority of cases.

So -- perhaps this is Spotlight indexing the drive while you're backing up?

[Bagelturf]

Would Spotlight index the newly-created disk image?

I did not see any Spotlight activity, but then I wasn't looking for any either.

Does SD take any special action when it starts backing up to a disk image, such as setting the Spotlight status to off or the same as the disk is backing up?

[dnanian]

It might, and we try to turn spotlight off and restore its state after... but that doesn't mean it always works as it should.