why averaging only 4MB/s and how to spare bad blocks?

[sjs]

Thank you. I see the plist exception files, that is good to know.

I know, good backups are essential and that is why i purchased your program and it was, in fact, one of my brand new 500GB backup HD's with the bad blocks. Bad blocks stink and they are often overlooked in the logs and overlooked as to reasons things are slowing down.

I have my main data set on 2 500GB HDs and this gets Smart Copied to TWO other pairs of 500GB HDs, rotated bi-monthly.

Its just that when moving this large a data set around takes full days when using FW400.

I did another smart update and despite what you said got more what I expected, 15MB/s, pretty much saturating the FW400 bandwidth with both drives on the same bus. But this smart update was the boot drive, full of smaller files. The other drive from before, the one where the smart update got only 2MB/s to a clean new drive, was full of large movie files.

Could the nature of these files be why? Otherwise, I will assume that that last 5-10x slower sync was due to bad blocks on my backup HD, which I just returned. I would like to understand what code you are using for a smart update. Is this ditto or rsync? And should a Smart Update to a new drive take the same time as a Format then Copy, programatically?

Is the code or pseudo code for these 2 different algoritm available anywhere? Thanks a lot.... Your program is the 1st I've used that pretty much always works. And I've tried them all.
Steve