SuperDuper incredibly slow.

[jdskee]

Configuration:

PowerBook G4 12" 1.5ghz 768mb RAM 60GB ATA
External Iomega 250GB USB2

SuperDuper is too slow. Ive verified that this is not an issue with my USB2 drive running at USB1 speeds; the drive is directly connected to the PowerBook and I have also disconnected any other USB devices.

I get (if Im lucky) 1.5 to 1.6mb/sec with SuperDooper. File copies in the Finder are quick, Backup Data (ProSoft) did an entire duplicate (about 50GB) in about 3 hours. Retrospect 6.1 is reporting anywhere between 190mb/min (3.1mb/sec) to 240mb/min (4mb/sec) on a Duplicate backup.

I am not backing up to a sparse image or other disk image in SuperDuper. This is a disk-to-disk clone.

What is going on here?

[dnanian]

Are you running any AntiVirus?

[jdskee]

Are you running any AntiVirus?

No, I am not running any antivirus software.

[dnanian]

I don't have an explanation of why things would be slow: your experience certainly isn't typical. Please send me a System Profiler report, with the drive attached, to the support address.

If you could complete a full backup and include the log from that, it'd help as well.

[melton]

Are you running Tiger?
After 5 hours creating a clone of a disk running MacOS 10.4.8 (G4 iMac) to a new disk on my first use of Super Duper with Tiger, I noted it was running at around 2 MB/sec (had copied about 35 GB of 80 GB in the 5 hours) and the new disk in the firewire case was making a lot of noise (seagate 7200.10 320 Gb 16 MB cache PATA 7200 rpm). In my experience, SuperDuper (ver 80) has been quite fast under Panther (10.3.9).

So I decided to add the new disk to Spotlight's privacy tab (Super Duper left running) and the disk has become much quieter and the effective copy speed is increasing as I sit here and type this response (now 2.41 MB/sec and around another 10 GB has been copied in the half hour since implementing the change to spotlight). Therefore I am suspicious that Spotlight indexing was the cause of this slow behaviour.

[jdskee]

Are you running Tiger?
After 5 hours creating a clone of a disk running MacOS 10.4.8 (G4 iMac) to a new disk on my first use of Super Duper with Tiger, I noted it was running at around 2 MB/sec (had copied about 35 GB of 80 GB in the 5 hours) and the new disk in the firewire case was making a lot of noise (seagate 7200.10 320 Gb 16 MB cache PATA 7200 rpm). In my experience, SuperDuper (ver 80) has been quite fast under Panther (10.3.9). ... Therefore I am suspicious that Spotlight indexing was the cause of this slow behaviour.

Hmmm, Ill try this. I noticed it does click quite a bit with SuperDuper. Ill try it again.

[dnanian]

If it's clicking, it's failing... we don't interact with it at a hardware level at all.

[melton]

If it's clicking, it's failing... we don't interact with it at a hardware level at all.
In my case, the use of clicking referred to heavy hard drive activity (and perhaps thermal re-calibration because of the hotness of the drive), rather than the 'click of death' which I have experienced with a number of failed hard drives.

Unfortunately the 'slow clone' I observed (2 MB/sec), prior to putting the clone drive into Spotlight's privacy pane, could not be booted from and both Diskwarrior (3.03) and Apple's Disk Utility failed to repair it.

After letting the target drive cool, I repeated the cloning process, but this time adding the target firewire drive (the one being used to hold the clone) to Spotlight's privacy pane before launching SuperDuper. The cloning process completed very successfully (66 GB cloned in 131 minutes), with the target hard drive running much quieter and cooler during the cloning period. I was able to boot and use the iMac from the cloned hard drive (noting that until Spotlight indexing completed on the first boot from the drive, the OS was somewhat slow to respond).

For the developer - does the reference in SuperDuper's dialog box to changes in Spotlight's state prior to cloning and at completion imply that SuperDuper should itself suppress Spotlight indexing of the new hard drive until the cloning process was completed?

[dnanian]

We do turn indexing off for the drive during the copy, and then restore its setting when we're done, but that doesn't mean Spotlight will *stay* off.

[echeng]

SuperDuper has been incredibly slow during networked backups for me as well.

With Firewire800, I'm getting over 30MB/s. With USB 2.0, I get 15MB/s. But over gigabit ethernet, I'm getting just over 2MB/s, which is nearly impossible to deal with.

Another thread said that switching to AFP over SMB would make the backup faster, but I switched to AFP and now I'm getting less than 2MB/s -- even slower than when using AFP.

I'm backup up to an Infrant ReadyNAS NV.

Any tips to get networked transfer speeds up to a useful speed?

Doing a finder cppy directly to the box over gigabit yields 30+ MB/s speeds.

[dnanian]

A Finder copy does not copy tons of teeny files, so that's not really a good comparison.

Your first copy might go a bit slower (to the same ReadyNAS NV, I get 4-6MB/s overall), but subsequent Smart Updates are quite fast indeed...