I'm only copying at 1.5mbps!
 

Why is that? Do I need to buy the copy in order to get the full speed? I bought a My Book drive with a 400 Firewire...could it just be my drive?
Also how do I make a "bootable Clone"? All I could find was "BackUp All Files".

Hi, "mywhitenoise". No, you don't need to buy a copy to run at full speed (although Smart Update, since it doesn't re-copy things, is much faster after the first time).

With speeds like that, it seems more likely that you've got something interfering with copy. Are you running any AntiVirus software?

"Backup - all files" will produce a bootable copy, if the source is also bootable.

Hope that helps!

No Anti-Virus software, i'm running off Mac OSX.
How long does it usually take for a backup, the first time around?

That depends entirely on the amount of data you have. In most cases, the overall speed on a Power PC Mac is about 6MB/s when copying everything. On an Intel, it's more like 12MB/s.

ah okay, so this is normal then.

I have about 200 GBs to copy, so I guess copying at 1.5 - 2mbps isn't anything worry about, right?

If you're not getting errors (try Cmd-l to see if the log has any errors), not running AntiVirus, and don't have an iSight or iPod on the FireWire bus, you should be fine as long as the # of files continues to go up...

My experience so far with SD! is that the backup rate is pretty high (I get 9 to 12MBs on a G5 Quad to external FW 800) for a full backup, until you start backing up zillions of little, tiny files. Apparently, each new file needs a lookup, a directory write, then the copying of a block or two. That really slows things down!

So, my iTunes and iPhoto folders copy pretty fast; my zillion other little word, preference, etc. files go much more slowly and the resulting rate of a full backup gets closer to 6MBs. And that's with a 7200RPM SATA internal drive to a 7200RPM FW800 drive.

Ed