[marblezilla]

My dad has a newer Apple Powerbook. I'm more of a Win kind of Tech Support guy, but never feels bad about broadening my field of knowledge.

Yesterday, I tried doing a full backup of his system onto a external fire-wire drive that had been formatted in the Mac file system and divided into thirds, about 72 G each, or so.

The backup transfer rate starts at over 100 and slows down after time, till the program freezes. Ive shut down everything, but Finder and Widgits?. heh, I'm typing this at home so I'll get the specs on the versions of Super & Mac Tiger, but I recall I checked super and it was the most current.

I checked the OS for updates. I loaded 3/4, I was told the latest 100M update from Apple was causing some issues, The other 3 didn't look like they'd affect Super or any storage apps.

The External enclosure was a inexpensive firewire/usb that said it works for Win & Mac. Dad couldn't rem if he heard anything about purely Mac enclosures being better for general usage than others.

I'll check in soon enough for any hints and update any system specifics.

I ran the disk checker app and all HDs and the external partitions seemed ok as far as general health.

Now i was able to back-up the user files. I assume these were small enough to not affect the transfer slowdown. He doesn't really have any saved music or pics, so I'll assume that other than apps, he is pretty lean in that respect.

There is another user's name in the login screen. he said they never get on. I could also backup the shared files of other users, but since there isn't any (other than a few files saying there is a 2nd possible user), that backup would have been tiny too.

I'm not even sure of what the normal backup transfer rate would be for a newer laptop using firewire. It might be fast at first and taper down to a standard rate. But transfer rates using a hardwire connection would be more of a software issue and be affected by system resources or other apps running too. I would assume in any backup, you would shut down anything you could, for how can any file or folder be saved if it is in use?