Time to create a new backup?
 

I've just purchased a new set of USB disks to use as backup for the MacBooks at home. The first is a backup of a MacBook Pro 2015 with a 250GB harddisk to an encrypted disk image (AES 128bit) on a brand new USB3 Seagate Backup Plus Slim. That one is NTFS formatted and using the Paragon drivers.
I'm slightly astonished that after 36 hours it's not yet complete.

Why would this take so long? How long does an initial backup take for you?

That's certainly slow. Spotlight is one thing that can cause slow operation. Antivirus is another. And, encryption obviously slows things down too.

Finally, NTFS and another driver is something I would avoid. Why are you doing that?

What OS version are you using?

I'm on Sierra still.

I was using NTFS because it does not seem possible to partition the Seagate Backup Slim disks. NTFS is then the lowest common denominator that every OS can at least read. With the idea that I use the disk also for some other things.

My MacBook has disk encryption enabled, to prevent data loss in case it gets stolen or lost. That's why I'm also using encryption on the backups, since otherwise I would be leaving my data completely open on a very portable external disk...

The speed in the end was really low though, 1.7MB/sec for the whole disk is what SuperDuper! reported. So I'm going to rethink the portable aspect of it and try again with HFS+ and disk images.

It is totally possible to partition Seagate Backup Slim disks... I would really avoid using NTFS (and images) here. But it is, of course, entirely your choice.

(I just wrote a long post about "best practices for backing up" that I hope will help explain my logic here, and tries to codify my thoughts on this kind of thing in general - https://www.shirt-pocket.com/blog/in...rfect_backups/).

I'd love to know how, because Disk Utility has the button greyed out when I select the Seagate Backup Slim. And that button is on when I insert a different random USB key.

[edit]
Got it. I had to reformat it to GUID partition map with a single partition, and then I could repartition the disk.
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