What am I doing wrong?

[chris_johnsen]

I have never seen any statistics for how long it takes to copy X files of size Y (a size distribution curve would be more reliable) from disk type Z to disk type W, but my guess is that it would not take more than a day to copy 80GB of relatively small files (as long as the files are not all minimal size). Your current speed is just an average over the files that have been copied so far. It will likely change as different sets of files are copied.

With Smart Update, I regularly update a couple of 40GB volumes (all but a couple of GB used) in 40-65 minutes to copy a month's worth of changed files from internal ATA drives to external USB 2.0 and Firewire 400 drives on older PPC machines. The first copies did take many hours, but all the subsequent ones go much faster.

Hang in there if you can afford the "downtime" right now. Later Smart Update-based backups will be faster.

Incidentally, this is why ‘estimated time to completion’ types of progress bars are so notoriously unreliable (stating “less than a minute left” for 3 hours, etc.). It is just really hard to predict how long copying a given set of files will take.