Slowwww backups

[ashleykaryl]

Is anybody else finding the backups incredibly slow now? I recently set up a firewire 800 drive as a backup for my main SSD drive and each daily backup seems to take an awfully long time, even when very little has happened during the day.

As a test I just ran a backup, which took about 20 minutes and then decided to run it again immediately afterwards. Now in theory little or nothing has changed in that one minute interval, so I would expect SuperDuper! to fly through this second smart update backup in seconds, but it has so far taken over 15 minutes and still not nearly finished.

This is High Sierra with an SSD backing up to the external drive, which is also in APFS format. It's never been like this before in the past and I'm using SuperDuper! version 3 (100).

[dnanian]

APFS is slower than HFS+ at present...and FW800 is slower than USB3 or Thunderbolt, so you have a relatively slow combo of devices...

When you say "nothing has changed", it still takes a while -- more than "seconds" -- to walk an entire folder tree and compare all the metadata for both drives - reading all that from the drive and literally doing comparisons. Why don't you send in the log when it's done so I can see the details?

[ashleykaryl]

I'm on a mid 2010 Mac Pro, so I don't have USB 3 or thunderbolt, but APFS with Firewire 800 feels slower than USB 2 with HFS+.

In the past if I had done something like this I would have seen the progress bar scream along with the appearance of super fast copy rates as smart update worked it's magic. The whole process feels much slower now, including the initial preparation and final phase with prebinding etc. Should I wipe the backup drive and format it as HFS+ I wonder. I'll send over the log so you can take a look.

[dnanian]

You can certainly do that to the destination and see if it helps. No doubt Apple will improve things as time goes on, though... send a log so I can see, OK?

[ashleykaryl]

OK sent that just a moment ago, so you should have the details before long.