anyone want to help a newb?

[jcapik]

I just tried to do a full backup on a 15" PB 80 GB drive to a 160 GB FW 800 drive and its been going for about 3 hours now. anyone have any tips, am I missing something or does backing up 55GB's take this long with an initial b/u
I'm running 10.3.9 and I'm waiting to install tiger. if anyone can help --thanks

[dnanian]

Help is here, newb or not, jcapik!

It's not clear from what you've said how, exactly, you've done the backup... did you back up to an image (much slower) or directly to the drive?

If you went directly to the drive, do you have any kind of AntiVirus software running?

It definitely shouldn't take 3 hours for 55GB direct-to-drive.

[jcapik]

Dave, I have no anitvirus on the machine so it can't be that, on the main window it says from MacHD to External 1 (my external drive obviously) and the script used is full backup all files

thanks

[dnanian]

OK; did you log out and back in with Shift down, to try to shut down any running programs?

What might be going on is that a program could be writing aggressively to a log file or data file. When that happens, the file looks much larger than it really is to some low-level file functions, and the file might get copied until the disk fills.

This typically happens if you've got a bad driver or other program logging a lot to the Console. But, there are other cases of file or folder damage that might cause the same thing.

The best thing to do is to try to let SD! finish its work, and then see what any error says... alternatively, if you're comfortable in Terminal, we can run some commands to see where it's "stuck"...

[jcapik]

tell me what to do in Terminal. I did do the logout and login with shift thing, and it must have worked because my font program didn't load. tell me what to do in terminal.

thanks

[dnanian]

Do:

sudo lsof | grep "SVUC" | pbcopy

That'll place all the files we have open on the clipboard. You can then email that to me at support, and I'll take a look.