After 13 hours, only 30% of the files copied. What am I doing wrong?

[oren_b]

The computer is an Intel-based Mac nini (not an iMac), OS is 10.4.5 and the disk is an external USB drive which I've benchmarked to copy a 100MB file in less than 10 seconds.

Here's a screenshot of SD:

Any idea how to overcome this slowness?

Thanks!

[dnanian]

Since you're copyhing to an image, and it's running slowly, and has only managed to copy 4GB, it looks to me like the drive is formatted as FAT32 (which has a 4GB file limit), not HFS+...

[oren_b]

You're right, it is a FAT32 drive. Does it have to be HFS+ only? I'd rather keep my external drive in a format that both Windows and OS X can read and write to.

BTW, if large images can't be written to FAT32, then it would be nice if the program would either span the files (like Ghost does) or display an informative message that explains what the problem is (and preferably suggests possible solutions).

[dnanian]

Well, you can repartition the drive with GUID, and have both a FAT32 and HFS+ format, but we cannot write to HFS+.

If you select the drive as a direct target, we do provide you with a message about what to do... however, if you store an image on it like this, the OS is failing "under us", so we're not in a position to tell you what's wrong...

[oren_b]

Originally Posted by dnanian

Well, you can repartition the drive with GUID, and have both a FAT32 and HFS+ format, but we cannot write to HFS+.

Unless I don't understand, you probably mean that SuperDuper can write to HFS+, but not to HFS+ on the same same drive with a FAT32 partition? Did I get this right?

If you select the drive as a direct target, we do provide you with a message about what to do... however, if you store an image on it like this, the OS is failing "under us", so we're not in a position to tell you what's wrong...

Would it be possible to detect that the partition is FAT32 and that the estimated image files size is going to be bigger than the limit of this file-system?

[dnanian]

What I'm saying is that the GUID partitioning scheme allows an HFS+ partition to exist side-by-side with a FAT32 partition. So, you can divide the drive, so your Windows machines can use the FAT32 part, and your Mac can use the HFS+ part.

We don't know how large an image is going to be, and estimating it would take nearly as long as it takes to fail. That said, I'm well aware that the image code could give a warning when you're storing to something that's not HFS+, and it's on my list of things to improve.