What am I doing wrong?

[poetrydaze]

Dave-- you've been very helpful with my guesstimate on time -- but I'm running into a problem that seems to happen to me with this program.

SuperDuper has been cloning my Intel Mac to a Lacie disk via firewire for more than 20-minutes and it's only transferred 200 MB.

The transfer rate reads 0.38 MB/s

What am I doing wrong? I've closed every operating application and have nothing running in the background.

I'm confused.

[chris_johnsen]

This may or may not be the situation your backup is facing, but copying many small files takes much longer than backing up a few large files. I would suggest just letting it run for a while.

The 160 minute figure was very much a "guesstimate". How the 80GB is actually used (the number, size, and distribution of files) will have a big impact on how long it takes to copy it.

However long it takes, Smart Update will be able to do the next backup in only a fraction of the time (since it only has to check, not copy the files that have not changed).

[poetrydaze]

That may explain it Chris. Most of my files are small files. Songs, photos, documents. But at 0.39 MB/s it could take a couple of days. Would that be unheard of?

Thanks, Dan

[chris_johnsen]

I have never seen any statistics for how long it takes to copy X files of size Y (a size distribution curve would be more reliable) from disk type Z to disk type W, but my guess is that it would not take more than a day to copy 80GB of relatively small files (as long as the files are not all minimal size). Your current speed is just an average over the files that have been copied so far. It will likely change as different sets of files are copied.

With Smart Update, I regularly update a couple of 40GB volumes (all but a couple of GB used) in 40-65 minutes to copy a month's worth of changed files from internal ATA drives to external USB 2.0 and Firewire 400 drives on older PPC machines. The first copies did take many hours, but all the subsequent ones go much faster.

Hang in there if you can afford the "downtime" right now. Later Smart Update-based backups will be faster.

Incidentally, this is why ‘estimated time to completion’ types of progress bars are so notoriously unreliable (stating “less than a minute left” for 3 hours, etc.). It is just really hard to predict how long copying a given set of files will take.

[poetrydaze]

Thanks Chris, very much for your answers and patience. Dan

[dnanian]

Let's see how it does over a bit more time, Dan. Again, as long as you're not running AntiVirus, no other software is interfering and your hardware is working properly, it should speed up significantly from that.