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Whoa. Time Machine wants HOW LONG to restore?

T

thenewguy

macrumors regular
Original poster
So today I decided to erase/reinstall leopard after my previous upgrade in order to start from scratch. Long story short I decided that i had made a mistake and so I wanted to restore from my external backup Time Machine drive (I use a MBP).

I put in the Leopard disc, went to Utilities: Restore system from Backup (with the time machine logo) and clicked through the menus.

The first odd thing happened when I selected the backup folder and then selected the destination drive - you know how it does a "calculating disk space" thing? Well it took about 25 minutes. I thought, OK, its just indexing or something.

So I hit restore. It wants.....are you sitting down?

37 hours to restore my system. And this is after an hour, so it's not just that initial miscalculation that often happens.

This is a USB 2.0 drive, an external Seagate FreeAgent 500gb. The time machine image shouldn't be more than 120gb at most, probably less.


Anyone have any ideas? If Time Machine really takes 30+ hours to restore an image I'd say that is a severe limitation.
 
Wow, that does seem absurdly long. I remember when i was using ipartition to move a 320gb partition on a FW400 drive, that took about 18 hours. I kinda wonder if you would get different speeds if you use USB2.0 or FW. USB is consistenly slower on long transfers, and im wandering if it has anything to do with that. However, 40 hours for 120gb seems too long.
 
Ya.

To make sure that it wasn't a fluke, the first time I tried it I aborted an hour into it and tried it again - same thing.

I'd say this is a pretty severe fault of Time Machine here.

Has anyone tried to restore large folders from TM within Leopard? Or is this only a result of from-CD restores?
 
This is a disturbing bit of information regarding Time Machine.

I don't have an explanation, but I sure would like to see one from an authoritative source.

Have you contacted Apple Service about this? I would think that they owe you an explanation.
 
Dayum. You could have manually backed everything up and restored it without the help of Time Machine a lot quicker than 40 hours!
 
How very strange. I successfully did a full restore from a Time Machine backup about the same size as yours, in 1.5 hours. I was using a FireWire 400 drive.
 
Well after 8 hours it was still on the same time line - in fact longer. After 8 hours it was 8.9% done.

As much as I wanted to let it run and test the whole procedure (And then transfer my backup files to a FW400 drive and try it from there) I just can't be w/o my computer for a number of days - so I scrapped the restore, installed from scratch and rebuilt the system manually (dragging over library files and all of that). what a PAIN - but at least it's a fresh system.

I really think a reputable source needs to test this issue - with USB 2.0, FW400 and FW800 drives.

And no, I didn't call Apple Service.
 
thenewguy said:
Well after 8 hours it was still on the same time line - in fact longer. After 8 hours it was 8.9% done.

I really think a reputable source needs to test this issue - with USB 2.0, FW400 and FW800 drives.

And no, I didn't call Apple Service.
Click to expand...

It would have been interesting and possibly fruitful if Apple CS had attempted to explain this.
 
lugesm said:
Isn't FireWire 400 about the same speed as USB-2 ?
Click to expand...

On paper USB 2.0 is a bit faster but it doesn't maintain the same speed like Firewire...Or so I've heard. I don't own any fancy hardware that uses those fancy Firewire ports 😛
 
I restored my MB from Time Machine via a USB 2.0 external HDD, it took about 30 mins to retore 40GB of information.
 
40 hours for 120 GB means that you are getting about 900 KBytes/sec. USB 1.1 has a maximum speed of 12 MBits/sec or about 1.5 MBytes/sec. That means that you are getting USB 1.1 - not USB 2.0 - speeds for your drive for some reason.
 
brkirch said:
40 hours for 120 GB means that you are getting about 900 KBytes/sec. USB 1.1 has a maximum speed of 12 MBits/sec or about 1.5 MBytes/sec. That means that you are getting USB 1.1 - not USB 2.0 - speeds for your drive for some reason.
Click to expand...

Can a low-grade USB cable cause 2.0-capable ports to fail over to 1.1 speeds?

This is why I avoid USB in general (except for things like flash drives). Firewire-only in my house for external hard drives and whatnot.
 
Some External drives have more than one FW or USB port on the back, will hooking up two wires be 2X faster 😕
 
killmoms said:
Can a low-grade USB cable cause 2.0-capable ports to fail over to 1.1 speeds?
Click to expand...
A low-grade cable can definitely diminish transfer performance, but all the way down to 1.1 speeds, I'm not sure...

Could be a bad cable, could be a failing internal or external HDD, could be that the external drive is in fact hooked up to a USB 1.1 port - the OP didn't specify the nature of the system. Even if the external drive is USB 2.0, it won't get these kinds of transfer speeds on a 1.1 port.
 
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