Restore speed from sparse image ..

[rlesperance]

Hi,

Is it normal that a not so big (±22GB) sparse image located on a USB2 external drive takes 4 hours to restore back to an Imac G5 ?

Regards.



Robert

[dnanian]

It kind of depends on the speed of the device you're restoring from, memory, etc...

[rlesperance]

Like I said the sparse image was on an attached USB 2drive and the copy was made to my iMac G5 (1.6GHZ - 2GB of memory) while the computer was running the install CD.

What other informations do you need to give an idea about the restore time required ? Is 4 hours normal or should I expect it to be faster ?

[dnanian]

Well -- it's hard to know what's normal in these situations. Is it progressing?

[rlesperance]

For sure ... I have been on this since morning. It took a bit of time to pay around with install DVDs and SD procedures to mount the sparse image. The restore took at least 4 hours. Just wondered if the time could be improve some way. Would it take less time if the restore was made from a direct FW400 or 800 drive sparse image ?

BTW why is sparse images the only way to backup to a mounted shared volumes over my LAN ?

[dnanian]

Yes, restoring from FW400/800 is going to be faster, especially if you start up from them and restore.

You have to use an image over a network because you can't otherwise preserve all ownership, permissions, metadata, etc without a far-side agent. (Note that Time Machine uses an image for the same reason.)

[rlesperance]

I understand the importance of preserving ownership, etc... , but that concern does not exist if I duplicate a hard drive on a partition of a direct connected drive.

What is the difference of creating a partition on a direct drive and on a local shared volume ?

[dnanian]

I don't understand what you mean. A directly connected drive is entirely different than a network drive.

[rlesperance]

That is all the point of my question ... I want to understand WHY a «network» shared volumes is different from a volume located on a «direct» connected drive.

[dnanian]

Because a network drive abstracts the file system through network interfaces (the other side of the connection could be FAT32, NTFS, HFS, ext3... anything) whereas a direct connection interacts with the file system directly.

[rlesperance]

I see .. Thank you !