how long should Superduper! take?

[shanner]

Hi, I'm trying to back up my hard drive to an external hd for the first time using superduper. It's been running for about 3 hours and looking at the progress bar, i'm thinking somethings not working... how long should it take does anyone know? Thanks!

 

[emw]

How much data are you backing up? How is the external HD connected?

i'd agree that 3 hours seems like a fairly long time, but if you have a lot of data going over a USB connection, it could very well take several hours.

When you say "looking at the progress bar, i'm thinking somethings not working", do you mean it's not actually moving, or just moving slowly? How far along is it?

 

[shanner]

I don't know exactly how much stuff I'm transferring (the entire contents of my hard drive, but how do I tell what that is?). And it is over a usb. The progress bar hasn't moved at all really and it just says "312 of 467, 473 files evaluated, 312 copied..."

 

[emw]

I don't know exactly how much stuff I'm transferring (the entire contents of my hard drive, but how do I tell what that is?). And it is over a usb. The progress bar hasn't moved at all really and it just says "312 of 467, 473 files evaluated, 312 copied..."

If it's stuck there, I'd guess that there's an issue with the copy. Unless file 312 is about 200GB or something

Can you cancel the operation from within the application?

If not, if you go to Force Quit... under the menu, does it say that Superduper is not responding? If so, you might need to force quit it.

You can tell how much data is on your HD by doing a Get Info... on it.

 

[phungy]

Open up the HD you are trying to backup and see how much space is free/taken. Then get back to us and we can tell you an estimate..

I backed up my HD last night via SuperDuper! Granted I probably had about 12GB to transfer including OSX and that took maybe ~1 hr.

 

[shanner]

thanks guys...

theres 121 GB used on the disk, out of a capicity of 152.

 

[phungy]

Yeah that may take a few hours...

 

[shanner]

Thanks again, I dont mind it taking a while so long as it is actually getting done.
And the external hd is making noises every so often, so maybe that's a good sign (?)

 

[phungy]

At least it is progressing and almost complete.

 

[acearchie]

well just for clarification;

I transfered 49.6 gb of films onto a small lacie 80Gb usb drive i have and that took precisely 13 hours!

 

[Heath]

Odd, I can back up about 40 gigs in about 40 - 50 minutes with SuperDuper. I do use a firewire external drive however. Is USB that much slower?

 

[emw]

Odd, I can back up about 40 gigs in about 40 - 50 minutes with SuperDuper. I do use a firewire external drive however. Is USB that much slower?

USB (not 2.0) is, I believe, limited to something like 12Mbps, where Firewire can go to 400Mbps. So Firewire could theoretically complete the transfer 30x faster. So 40 minutes to 13 hours isn't surprising.

 

[Viremia]

YIKES!!!

That's why I'm glad I went with Firewire800 for my external backup drive. The first time I backed up my user files (~40GB) it took relatively little time. The subsequent updates to the backup files are only taking about 5 minutes to evaluate and transfer maybe 1-2 GB each time.

 

[shanner]

ok, now I'm using firewire and it's moving nice and fast. I had been using usb and it was incredibly slow, but it looks good now. It looks like it'll take about an hour to copy 120 GB, (instead of forever!)

 

[emptyCup]

Firewire is much faster than USB for backups but always doing a full backup will still take time. Smart Backup, and scheduling, is what makes buying the full version of SuperDuper! worth the $30.