Slow incremental cloning

[fabius]

I back up two drives to partitions on an external drive.

One of the drives to be backed up has around 50GB of MP3s and the incremental backups of that take a matter of seconds, as it whizzes through, finding little new to backup.

But the other drive to be backed up, containing 35GB of the System, User files (in fact, everything except music) takes rather longer - every time I do an incremental backup Super Duper sits there for 6-10 minutes doing nothing. Where the filepaths appear later it just says "Cloning [Drivename] to [Drivename2]".

Is this normal? Is it just because of the much larger number of files? Thanks.

[dnanian]

Hm. That doesn't sound terribly normal. When you say it sits there doing "nothing", what does SuperDuper! look like?

It sounds to me like you might have a *huge* number of temporary files, which are being examined in the early stages of operation. Have you rebooted this system recently?

[macfeller]

My daughter had a similat situation. There was one huge file whose permissions were hosed. In Get Info she was not the owner, nor was anyone/thing else. Said file was copied each time.

[dnanian]

It's possible that could be the problem here, of course... but it sounds like -- in his situation -- the delay is before the copying even starts. Hopefully we'll find out more shortly.

[macfeller]

and doing so steadily.

BTW, I did give up on Synk and bought my own SD. Looking forward to v.2!

[dnanian]

Great to hear! Thanks for the support...

[fabius]

Originally Posted by dnanian

Hm. That doesn't sound terribly normal. When you say it sits there doing "nothing", what does SuperDuper! look like?

Well, it says "Copy Files from [Drive1] to [Drive2]" then it has the progress bar (not moving) and then it says "Cloning [Drive1] to [Drive2]". Then there's a "Stop" button.

Originally Posted by dnanian

It sounds to me like you might have a *huge* number of temporary files, which are being examined in the early stages of operation. Have you rebooted this system recently?

Yeah, I've rebooted in the past since using it, and have just tried rebooting again. After rebooting this time SuperDuper! only took 4.57 before the above situation changed and it began displaying file names... so maybe it's gradually getting quicker!

[dnanian]

OK. This is quite unusual, and I have one other user reporting something semi-similar (though in his case there's a weird, hour-long delay).

Let me ask you to do the following:

* Open Terminal
* Type "sudo sample SVUClone 5", hit return, type your password but don't hit return yet.
* Start the backup.
* At the pause, switch back to the terminal and press return.
* Allow it to complete, and send the sample file (it'll tell you the name), SuperDuper!.log and System Profiler report to support.

Thanks!

[fabius]

Hmm, annoying... this time, for the first time, SuperDuper! didn't have that wait, and went straight into copying files. I'll try doing as you suggest when I next do a backup.

[dnanian]

Drat. Well, a watched pot never boils, and all that.

Let me know if it does pause later, and try to capture the info. Thanks!