I'm backing up my HD to a new external hard drive using time machine for the first time. It is going painfully slow. DOes anyone know how I can speed it up?
the external HD I was using only came with a USB interface, so firewire was not an potion. I searched some on the internet and come upon a tip to go into spotlight and remove the external drive from indexing by spotlight. This sped up the backup process. Originally it took about 30 minutes to backup 2GB. After removing the HD from spotlight, it took 2 hours to backup the final 70GB.
Thanks for all your replies
If you use a different interface (non-USB) like eSATA or FireWire, Time Machine would be very fast. I'm assuming you are using USB, which is why it's slow.
yup if your using usb its pretty slow if it was firewire it would be way quicker
Not really. The first TM backup takes a long time because it has to index everything, not because it takes a long time to write the data to disc.