Slow Backup under 10.4.5
 

Really appreciate using SuperDuper. Lets me sleep at night, but lately . . .

Using 10.4.5 and SD! 2.01 my backup times are dramatically longer.
I used to backup over a long lunch (1 hour). Now I'm estimating 5 +hours to complete a backup.

I'm using a firewire 400 drive. To be fair I"m backing up 100gig of data.

Effective copy speed has settled in at 2.41 MB/sec.

I'm booted in "safe mode" and I'm monitoring the console.log: Getting lots of

"2006-02-21 09:09:30.601 SuperDuper![167] Unable to retrieve volume name
2006-02-21 09:09:30.766 SuperDuper![167] LOGGED EXCEPTION: FSGetVolumeInfo failed., reason: Unable to retrieve volume name, userInfo: (null)"

Any assistance would be appreciated!

Are you using Smart Update? It sounds to me like you're doing an erase-then-copy...

Yes. I've always done an erase-then-copy.

Also, as I'm running right now, my "Effective copy speed is 7.4 MB/sec" -- significately increased.

I don't know why this would increase so much 50 minutes into the copy.

Any thoughts on the "Unable to retrieve volume name" message?

OK. Well, don't do that! :)

Instead, use Smart Update. You'll get the same result as Erase, then copy, but an update will only take a few minutes, rather than hours (depending on what you've changed).

I can't explain why your backups are slowing down, except to say that your drive might be experiencing hardware problems, your folder structure might be fragmented, etc...

The copy speed can change all the time, depending on the types and sizes of files being copied.

The "Unable to retrieve volume name" bug only occurs with erase, then copy, and won't affect your copying. It's fixed in the next release of SD, due soon.

Naismeth

This might be off the wall, but I was not able to get my external F/W drive to function reliably at all under 10.4.5. On the Apple Support discussions, a number of firewire problems are being reported with various devices--drives, iPods, cameras (less), audio devices, etc.

In my case, the volumes would appear to mount from the external, but access to them was unreliable. This is my backup drive, but I never got around to being able to write to it, so can't address the backup speed issue.

For me, reverting to 4.4 (via my SuperDuper backup, of course--THANKS DAVE) was the ticket. You might try that (or whatever version of Tiger you were using before) unless you happen to REALLY need one of the new/improved features of 4.5.

Just a thought.

Thanks for all the input. I hesitate to even start a thread with the word "slow" because I don't want to slander a product I know to be very good.

Thanks for the great support!

I'll give smart update a try. Its just that I'm conservative and I didn't want there to be ANY issue during a restore.

I may have to increase my backup cycle because I did not do a backup prior to 10.4.5.
I haven't noticed any external drive issues, but this is the first backup under 10.4.5.