Backing Up to Network Share - AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH !!!!!
 

Sorry - had to scream. Been away from SD for some time as I upgraded my Macbook Pro drive to 250 gigs. Today I received my 1 TB OWC Mercury Elite Pro. It's connected to a Powerbook G4 running Server 10.5.5 and I thought I would be cool and back up the MBP over my LAN. Cripes!! 6.0 mb/s transfer rate; maybe this was a bad idea!! At this speed even incremental backups will be painful - 4.5 hours and counting here.

It's very cool technology though!

6.0 MB/s? Wow, that's about seven times faster than the speed I'm getting! My network backup displayed an effective speed of ~0.85 MB/s today...

I agree; I really like SuperDuper! I just need to figure out how to make it (or my connection) copy faster! (BTW I saved the log in case I can post/send it in to the developer in order to troubleshoot. Perhaps I need to change my router's settings/set port-forwarding or something?)

My setup:
PowerBook G3 (running Tiger 10.4.11) connected via ethernet to D-Link DI-624 router connected via ethernet to a desktop PC (running WinXP Pro SP3).

What I do:
I mount my XP system using Tiger's SMB/CIFS File System Authentication dialog. (In the "Select the SMB/CIFS shared volume you want to connect to" dialog, I select SharedDocs.) Then I use SuperDuper! Any idea why I'm getting such tremendously slow copy speeds?

Subsequent copies should be faster, and faster devices copy faster (we're not CPU bound, and we copy as quickly as the system lets us in your situation - the same copy happens whether you're connected directly or networked).

For example, on the ReadyNAS Pro I get the same copy speed as I get to a direct FireWire drive. The ReadyNAS NV is a bit slower than that, and the Time Capsule or Airport-attached disks are very slow (first copy)...

A PowerBook G3 is kind of a slow Mac to start with, with slow I/O and slow networking. Perhaps copy to a directly connected drive instead?

To add insult to injury my Powerbook locked up about 30 mb's short of completion.

I connected my MBP directly to the 1TB drive via firewire and backed up 100 gigs in about 45 mins.

Thanks for the info., Dave. I tried connecting via USB to my external drive but it's currently formatted as NTFS so I went with copying to my PC first. (The PowerBook G3 is also only equipped with USB 1.x so I'm probalby going to want to dig up a USB pcmcia card or something.)

The G3 doesn't have FireWire?

Are you comparing it with FW400 or FW800 ? Could I expect a speed equivalent to ReadyNAS Pro with any NAS Gigabit ethernet drive ?

Definitely not. Most "consumer" NASen are much slower.

If most are not fast, which are the faster and how much faster ?

I want a NAS drive, because I want a backup drive that is always connected and that is not in the same room as the computer in case of theft or damage directly to the computer. With «gigabit ethernet», a NAS drive can be located very far from the computer and have faster connection speed.

My backup strategy is completed by a small portable external 500GB FW800 drive.

I haven't tested all of them, Robert. The ReadyNAS Pro is quite fast, and I get excellent throughput (especially to iSCSI). I've never found a low-cost 'consumer' NAS that had even remotely similar throughput.

The ReadyNAS Pro is an expensive machine. I would probably live something slower. Where can I get updated information on reliable and connection speed for consumer NAS drive ?

I don't know, sorry - no doubt there are a number of review sites that specialize in reviewing NAS units... the ReadyNAS NVX is a recent Intel-based NAS that is likely to be quite fast, too.

Thanks ...

Do you know about the Drobo NAS ?

The DroboShare is not particularly fast. I have not tested the Drobo PRO.