really really slow speeds
 

How long is super duper! supposed to take on the initial backup (a full copying without the smart update stuff)?
I'm using a USB2 portable hard drive. It's writing to a disk image on said drive. It's writing at .58 MB/s. It's copied about 4gigs in 2 hrs. Is this normal?
Running tiger on a G4 iBook. I was worried that my hard drive was failing because I heard clicking. Could this be the reason?

Sounds like your USB drive is running at low-speed (which is one reason we suggest FireWire drives) - do you know if your iBook supports high speed USB transfers?