A Big Thank-you, and how long should an inital back-up take?

[justal]

First up, I've been using SuperDuper! and its Smart Update feature for a while now to create a bootable daily backup of my internal hard drive. Unfortunately I got to make use of it in earnest last week when my nice shiny 18 month old 1.5Ghz G4 Powerbook decided to blow up!... Not much fun, apparently it needs a new logic board and the repair will cost as much as buying a new one, You would think that a £1500 laptop would last more than 18 months!

Anyway, thankfully I had an old eMac under the desk and I was able to simply connect this to my external firewire drive which contained a clone of my powerbook drive thanks to SuperDuper!. This meant I could boot the eMac from it and continue working.. THANK YOU SUPERDUPER!!

Of course, all this means I have essentially been working from my Back-up so I have now bought another external Hard Drive (the internal drive on the eMac simply isn't big enough) and I am in the process of creating another bootable clone using SupeDuper!. The bootable drive that I'm attempting to clone contains about 60GB of data and so far SuperDuper has been running for 10 hours. According to the progress bar it is about a third of the way through the copy process... Just how long should it take? SHould it really take 30 hours?? Both drives are 7200rpm, one is connected to the iMac with Firewire 400 the other with USB 2.0

Thanks.
Al.

[dnanian]

USB 2 can "step down" to USB 1.x speeds, Al, in a lot of cases... and I'm almost positive that the eMac doesn't support USB 2.0 Hi-Speed. So, it's running at 1.1Mbps, not 480... and the backup is going to take a while.

Glad the backup proved useful, though -- immediate recovery is exactly the idea!

[justal]

Aha... I've just checked and you are correct... eMacs USB is only 1.1 and therefore it is transferring data at 12Mbps max rather than 480. Quite a shock after the 800Mbps I'm used to from the Firewire 800 on my Powerbook!!

Al.

[dnanian]

Yep. Good ole USB.

[justal]

Woohoo, it's finally finished, after just over 27 hours!!

Trouble is I've tried selecting the clone as the start-up disk just to check that it has worked OK but when I click restart within the start-up disk pane of System Preferences I just get a spinning beachball for a while followed by a 'boink' noise and then nothing else, it doesn't restart... I had assumed it would simply restart from the clone albeit slowly over the USB 1.1 connection?

Al.

[dnanian]

Nope -- can't boot from USB, Al, at least not with most PPC-based Macs.

[justal]

Ah... B*gger... Wish I'd known that before buying a USB drive as that means it isn't a lot of use to me a back up then.

Oh well, we live and learn!

Al.

[dnanian]

Well, actually, the backup retains its bootable properties, so once restored to a supported boot device it'll work. You just can't boot from it directly.

[dnanian]

(I do discuss this in the User's Guide and it's in the System Requirements for SD!, too...)

[justal]

Don't worry, I wasn't getting at you or SuperDuper, it's my fault! I've never used the 'Restore' feature of SuperDuper and hopefully never will have to.. I'm assuming it is really just the same as erasing and copying during a normal back-up but the other way around.

My USB back up isn't completely useless I know, as all the files are still there so I'll be able to get to them if disaster strikes (again), but having a bootable back-up is the perfect solution for me... Don't worry I'll get another firewire drive at some point and use the USB drive to store video files on... I've been trying to persuade my wife that we need a drive just for video files for a while!!!

Al.

[dnanian]

Wasn't directed at you -- more at others who might read the thread & are looking for the info. USB drives can be frustrating, but supposedly they are booted on the Intel Macs, which is good news for all.

[justal]

No problem... Have you got a Universal Binary of SuperDuper that works on the Intel Macs already or are you still working on that??

As my Powerbook has blown up (which was why I was originally booting from my SuperDuper back-up) I am looking to get a new Mac and was half tempted by the 20" Intel iMac. I'm a little put off by the fact that most of my apps will be running under Rosetta emulation so I'm unsure how well they will perform and of course by the fact that I dind't think SuperDuper was working on them yet. Can the Intel Macs bot from both USB and Firewire external drives?

We're getting a bit off topic now sorry!

Al.

[dnanian]

We're working on our Intel version. The blog has details. The current version does not work under Rosetta.

From all reports, Intel macs can boot from both FireWire and USB external drives, but those drives must be partitioned using a new scheme. A backup made on a PowerPC based mac will not be bootable on an Intel mac.