Restoring from sparsebundle / sparseimage

[Kalkas]

I have noticed that it takes too much time to restore a disk from a sparsebundle or sparseimage. I have backed up about 95 GB content of my harddisk, and it takes two hours to restore it using Disk Utility.

Is this normal?

On the other hand, restoring from a dmg-image, takes about 15 min. However, the process of creating such image takes 5 hours! It is better to create a sparsebundle because it takes very little time when doing second time.

I find it very frustrating that restoring takes so much time.

Kalkas

[dnanian]

Well, in general, Read-Only images spend a lot of time up front ensuring that the image can be written quickly, at a low level, during restore... whereas a read/write image/bundle does a file-by-file copy which takes a longer time. Not much can be done about this, but since you restore rarely and back up frequently, I'd generally advise using a read/write image and paying the rare time price at restore time.

[Kalkas]

Thanks for your advice. I use dmg (read only) images only for critical and important backups, such as the backup image of the drive right after installation of a new operating system, or right after an important and critical upgrade.

I understand that it takes so much time of creating/restoring images because my drive is quite large.

Kind regards,
Alex

[dnanian]

A read-only image isn't really "better" for critical or important backups: you can always lock the image...