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Old 12-29-2006, 05:11 PM
SuperDuperUser SuperDuperUser is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2006
Posts: 9
Thumbs up what worked for me (it isn't back up over network after all)

Quote:
Originally Posted by dnanian View Post
There's no trick here: with a slow G3 I'd expect slower speeds, and 2-6MB/s is right in the expected range... but I wouldn't use networking, rather FireWire Target Disk Mode.

Thanks for the feedback. that slow, huh? darn! and unfortunately since the G3 is version 10.3.9 and therefore pre-Tiger (pre firewire target disk capable), it doesn't handle the FireWire Target Disk Mode -- or at least according to what I've read (and attempted).

STATUS UPDATE 1: Most recently: I finally got green lights on each computer for built-in firewire in network status under system prefs, but I can't get either of the connections to actually 'connect' via Go>Connect to Server > using ftp://192.168.2.x for each nor just plain ole 192.168.2.x (.2 & .3 respectively) manually assigned to each even though I obviously know the user name and password for each.

Under this scenario, I am still currently able to have a green and working ethernet internet dsl connection too.

I thought mac networking was supposed to be so easy? My brain don't git it.


STATUS UPDATE 2: this info from http://www.gbradhopkins.com/archives...k_two_mac.html helped me get 2 macs back to firewire networked while still being connected to the internet and each other.
Next I will try the SuperDuper backup(update) and see how that goes again. (I still can't believe I should be okay with 2MB/s. If that's true, I want my money back!)

STATUS UPDATE 3: Well, they may be connected and superduper is backing up -- .32 MB/s -- POINT 32 that is correct. So, obviously this is not going to work either because the speed is abysmal. I guess I'm going to have to go offline and try ethernet to ethernet. What will happen if I tell SD to 'stop copying finles to the backup using smart update'?

STATUS UPDATE 4: Changed strategy completely which is working better & faster.

Here's what happened. When I went to do another 'over network' back up / update the entire sparseimage was corrupt. Completely unusable. Well that was so slow anyway and I really hated that. I'm not saying this new strategy is blazing fast, but comparatively it's much faster ONCE the first backup happens.

What I got working:
Bought an external FireWire FW400 drive on sale and with a rebate after finding a good coupon or link or some good discount on some site i stumbled upon (i think it was Coupon4Free.com but can't be totally for sure).

The external FW drive is slightly larger than my current hard drive, I think it's 300 or 320, but once formatted loses usable space but still larger than my 250GB hard drive.

Then I connected only that FW drive to the FW bus. Then I started the superduper process all over again, completely new. I think it took over 7 hours to back up and I think it was lucky to rarely reach 11-12MB/s speed occasionally but seemed mostly around 6-7MB/s.

When I went to do smart update it went pretty fast. right now it is going at 61.67 MB/s.

But that's not all of the story because my problem was still to get the imac g5 backed up to the internal IDE drive in my second mac (older G3). (I know even firewire drives can develop corruptions and problems -- believe me I know -- it happens!) So after the finish of the SuperDuper back up to the FW drive, after ejecting and shutting off the external FW drive, I hooked it up to the combo PCI USB/FW port card added to the G3 (because the original FW bus on the Rev 1 b/w G3 has corruption problems and issues! -- and it is slower than the card added to the PCI slot. verified by my own tests.)

Anyway, I told SuperDuper to back up the Firewire Drive to the large internal hard drive (added to the G3 bus through another PCI card). That worked -- in fact the speed of first initial back up from the firewire drive to the OLD G3 was much FASTER than the first back up from the g5 to the firewire -- how do you explain that? And the subsequent backup updates from the firewire to the extra internal G3 hard drive go pretty fast too.

Granted this is only about a week of tests -- and there are hassles with all the careful ejecting, powering down, connecting to other computer, etc -- BUT now I have two alternating back up plans that I can at least feel a little better about breathing easy for now.

Next is to get an offsite copy alternative plan set up probably with another external firewire drive -- but hafta do some saving for a while again!

Meanwhile maybe this will give somebody an idea for a similar plan because my experience is the backup via network just is too susceptible to MANY many quirks and problems, not to mention even more annoyingly slow than the process I am now using and can now live with (so far so good anyway).

THANKS SuperDuper!

PS: is there a reason to be concerned that SDCopy not responding is permanently showing in the activity monitor (takes up 15-43% of the cpu on a varying basis) during the back up process? It doesn't seem to make a difference in the back up speed -- now at 65 MB/s -- but seems strange?

Again, THANKS & happy new year.

Last edited by SuperDuperUser; 01-08-2007 at 07:43 PM. Reason: status update
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