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PatriotInvasion

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jul 18, 2010
1,643
1,048
Boston, MA
So I am currently backing up to a 1TB LaCie Thunderbolt drive and a 1TB Time Capsule. I'm wondering why the Backups.backupdb folder is contained within a sparsebundle disk image on my Time Capsule, but not on my LaCie drive.

On the LaCie drive, the backup folder just sits on the drive unencrypted. Any idea why?

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Also as a side note, why does the Thunderbolt drive claim to get up to 10GB/second and it never comes anywhere remotely close to that? It's fast, but more like 1GB every 10 seconds when copying from my rMBP's SSD to the HDD of the Thunderbolt drive.
 
Nov 28, 2010
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So I am currently backing up to a 1TB LaCie Thunderbolt drive and a 1TB Time Capsule. I'm wondering why the Backups.backupdb folder is contained within a sparsebundle disk image on my Time Capsule, but not on my LaCie drive.

On the LaCie drive, the backup folder just sits on the drive unencrypted. Any idea why?
That has to do with how Time Machine handles network and local backups. Network backups get stored in that disk image, local backups get stored in folders and files.
Time Machine FAQ

Also as a side note, why does the Thunderbolt drive claim to get up to 10GB/second and it never comes anywhere remotely close to that? It's fast, but more like 1GB every 10 seconds when copying from my rMBP's SSD to the HDD of the Thunderbolt drive.
The limiting factor is the HDD, most available mass produced HDDs have a limit of 130 MB/s and less, you would need to put about ten HDDs into a RAID 0 to get 10 Gb/s, or use two S-ATA 6.0 Gbps (S-ATA III) SSDs in RAID 0.
 

PatriotInvasion

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jul 18, 2010
1,643
1,048
Boston, MA
That has to do with how Time Machine handles network and local backups. Network backups get stored in that disk image, local backups get stored in folders and files.
Time Machine FAQ


The limiting factor is the HDD, most available mass produced HDDs have a limit of 130 MB/s and less, you would need to put about ten HDDs into a RAID 0 to get 10 Gb/s, or use two S-ATA 6.0 Gbps (S-ATA III) SSDs in RAID 0.

Thanks for the link. Hmm, I don't know much about RAID set ups. Seems a little too advanced for my needs. But, if I had sprung for the LaCie Thunderbolt SSD instead of the higher capacity HDD, would the actual speeds copying from the rMBP to the external SSD be significantly faster?
 
Nov 28, 2010
22,670
30
located
Thanks for the link. Hmm, I don't know much about RAID set ups. Seems a little too advanced for my needs. But, if I had sprung for the LaCie Thunderbolt SSD instead of the higher capacity HDD, would the actual speeds copying from the rMBP to the external SSD be significantly faster?

Yes, the transfer would be five to six time faster, depending on what you copy (50 GB of data spread onto 50,000 files of 1 MB each copies slower than 50 GB in one file).
 
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