the extra files

[zdoob]

greetings. i just completed my first complete backup, and have a few questions...

i have 503,494 files - about 92 GB - on my source drive. SD copied 495,971 of those in about 1:02:24. i made a clone of my G5s internal HD to an external OWC firewire 800 drive (which i zeroed and partitioned first). the drive specs say that my transfer rate should be: FireWire 800 - 800Mbps (or 100MB/sec), so why was i topping out at 27MB/s?

also, what about those other several thousand files? why did SD deem them unnecessary to copy, and won't i need them if i need to restore from the clone?

when SD was done (all check marks complete) the drives were obviously still working heavily for about 10 minutes. then i noticed that spotlight is indexing. is it indexing the clone? is this necessary? it's been over 20 minutes now and it says it's only 3% complete...

*edit*
i've got a few gigs of archived files on another FW drive. would i use SD to copy those to the new drive, or just drag them over?

thanks for your help - this is a great product!

[dnanian]

Theoretical interface speed -- 800Mbps -- is not something that you're likely to achieve in real world situations. We're copying hundreds of thousands of tiny files, and a few large ones, and we're updating lots of metadata, time information, folder structures, etc. It's just not something that's going to top out a streaming data rate (although it does saturate the I/O channel pretty well).

The other files were likely temporary files or VM swap files, if you used "Backup - all files" as your copy script. They won't be needed, and have no meaning across a reboot.

If you don't want the copy indexed, drag the volume into the Spotlight preference pane's Privacy tab. That'll prevent the indexing.

Regarding archived files, as indicated in the User's Guide, you shouldn't mix a backup with "data" -- your archives. When you try to update the drive with Smart Update, those archives -- which aren't present in the selected files on the source -- would be deleted.

Instead, partition the drive into a storage volume and a backup volume, and put any data in its own partition.

Make sense?

[zdoob]

yes. all of it makes sense! thanks. i did make partitions, and wasn't planning on mixing the archives and clone. just wondering if i should also use SD to copy the archives to the archives partition... or just drag them over.

thanks!

[dnanian]

Ah. If they're just files owned by you, you can just drag 'em over.

[zdoob]

i'm floored by your response time to inquiries here. great job!

i just booted my G5 from the clone on my firewire drive... all seemed to work as expected. then i restarted and booted from my internal drive and now spotlight is re-indexing my internal drive. is this normal? why does it have to index again?

thanks again for a great product and even better customer support!

[dnanian]

I think the response time just indicates that I have no life at all.

Spotlight is re-indexing because the paths to the files changed when you rebooted. That invalidated the on-disk cache, and so it's doing it again.