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Time Machine initial backup speed
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Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Jun 2007
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I know there are a lot of people using Time Machine so I wanted to ask about impressions on the time it should take for the initial backup. I have almost 80 gigs of information and set up Time Machine to back up to an external USB Lacie drive (500 gigs). I let it run overnight (so roughly 8 hours) and when I checked it this morning, it had gotten through 16 gigs. That seemed slow to me but I thought I'd ask people what their experience was. I am sure Time Machine does more than just copy the information, after all.
Thanks for any information!
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Moderator  Join Date: May 2001
Location: Hilbert space
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From the top of my head, I can think of two reasons:
(i) You've connected your harddrive as a slower 12 MBit/s device (roughly 1 MB/s). This may happen if (a) your Mac doesn't support USB 2.0 (which Mac do you have?), (b) you connect your harddrive via a USB 1.1 hub (e. g. the built-in hub of your old ACD, your Mac keyboard's hub or some old external hub) or (c) you're using your hd on a hub with another device that creates a lot of traffic.
(ii) You have lots and lots of small files which take longer to be copied.
In either case, it should be faster.
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I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
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Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Jun 2007
Status:
Offline
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Thank you for the response. I may have numbly connected the drive to my keyboard. I have a MacBook Pro 2.16 so it should support USB 2. I think that may have been the issue. Thank you for the heads-up!! I will try that and get back.
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Moderator Join Date: May 2001
Location: Hilbert space
Status:
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Yes, your machine supports USB 2. 
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I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
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Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Jun 2007
Status:
Offline
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I feel silly. Yes, I had plugged the drive into the keyboard. I attached it directly to the computer last night and Time Machine backed up properly and pretty quickly. So far, so good! Thanks for the help.
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Dec 2001
Location: Durham, NC
Status:
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So, anyone know why it'd be going slowly on a FireWire 400 disk? Mine has been going for 6 1/2 hours and has 13.7 GB done. I guess that's still faster than stirrell's, but it still seems awful slow for copying files. Anyone know what an average transfer rate is?
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Nov 2000
Location: in front of my Mac
Status:
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That's way too long. Even with a cheap disk and/or bridge you should be getting north of 20MB/s with FW400. You're getting about 0.6 MB/s. Bad cable maybe? Have you tried swapping the FW cable? Or the FW port?
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Dec 2001
Location: Durham, NC
Status:
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Originally Posted by Simon 
That's way too long. Even with a cheap disk and/or bridge you should be getting north of 20MB/s with FW400. You're getting about 0.6 MB/s. Bad cable maybe? Have you tried swapping the FW cable? Or the FW port?
I didn't try either of those things. Wasn't sure TM'd be able to pick up where it left off if I interrupted it, so I just tried to ignore it, use my other Mac. After I posted, the average speed did change some. After 10 hours, it had done about 40 GB. Still slow. Anyway, it would be done now, except it's backing up a CD I forgot to eject. 
The frustrating thing is that once I get back from "vacation", I'm going to buy a bigger backup drive, so I'm going to have to do this over. But I'll try swapping cables/ports then.
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