Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

joefinan

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
I started my first back-up yesterday and it has done 12.1GB out of 59GB in 14hrs.

This is going to take DAYS! How crap. How completely and utterly crap.
 
Before crapping all over the place, let we do some checkups shall we..

1. How did you format your HD? Make sure it is the GUID partition table
2. Did you do complete format?
3. Have your spotlight finished indexing your main HD
4. Is your external HD has USB2.0 connectivity? Firewire is even faster

I have my external HD partitioned to be 130 GB in HSF+ with GUID partition table, and 20 GB of FAT32... It has been running great... The initial transfer was quite slow though since I'm using USB2.0.. The transfer rate was about 11 MB/sec average...
 
1. Yes
2. Yes
3. Yes
4. It's Firewire 400

Can I continue crapping all over the place now?
 
I started my first back-up yesterday and it has done 12.1GB out of 59GB in 14hrs.

This is going to take DAYS! How crap. How completely and utterly crap.

What processor? How much RAM?
Time Machine doesn't seem to be limited by hard disk speed.
 
Disconnect it, format the drive, restart from the beginning. There's obviously something wrong. My first back up took about 40 minutes, and i was backing up 78GB of data.

Edit: I mean the external drive, not the internal.
 
It took me an hour and half to back up over 100 gigs of data using firewire 400 to a lacie external 1TB drive. I had a throughput of over 30megs per sec for the larger files, probably due to the dual raid hard disks in the lacie drive. but still, I always had around 24MB/s throughput on a portable ext HDD over fw400. So it has to be something to do with the drive or formatting. restarting the process is recommended, unless you have an old system that is too slow to handle the fw400 connection which i highly doubt.
 
1. Yes
2. Yes
3. Yes
4. It's Firewire 400

Can I continue crapping all over the place now?

Not yet... Please follow ayeying's suggestion

Disconnect it, format the drive, restart from the beginning. There's obviously something wrong. My first back up took about 40 minutes, and i was backing up 78GB of data.

Edit: I mean the external drive, not the internal.
 
I have a powerbook G4 with about 65gb on the disk. Backing up with Time Machine for the first time over FW 800 took over 8 hours. Its just really slow the first time.
 
I did mine with USB and it didn't take anywhere near as long as that it took maybe an hour and a half and I backed up about 42 GB
 
Disconnect it, format the drive, restart from the beginning. There's obviously something wrong. My first back up took about 40 minutes, and i was backing up 78GB of data.

Edit: I mean the external drive, not the internal.

Ditto the above. End the thing, reformat the drive and start over.
 
Like everyone else said, it's ridiculous to let it keep going.

There's clearly a problem, either a bad cable or a badly formatted drive or a bad disk controller or something. This 32+hour backup is all going to be wasted when you reformat. Why are you continuing?
 
Something must be wrong...

I did a backup with Time Machine to a firewire hard drive, connected to a 400 mhz G4, connected to an old Airport Base station via ethernet, all wirelessly connected (802.11g) to my 12" powerbook and it took about 12 hours for 60 gigs.

Something is obviously wrong with your drive or your software.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.