Too Slow Too Slow!!!

[Fouster]

Hi there.This is my first post.
I downloaded before a few hours Supeduper 2.1.3 and I liked the whole enviroment so i decided to start a backup.
I wanted to backup my macbook to a partition in my pc.
1) I tried it to connect it wirelessly with my USR 9108 router but the speed was a disappointment! 720kb/s !! I said ok it's probably the wireless.

2) So I made a connection with an ethernet cable. Macbook ,ethernet cable to router and the router to the pc.
The speed now was 1.5MB/s !! VERY DISAPPOINTING!!!

So what's going on because otherwise it seems like a very nice program.

P.s I tested to tranfer files both wirelessly and wired and my speeds were very normal so i don't thing it's a problem with the network!

[dnanian]

This is about what I'd expect for a first backup, "Fouster". Backing up is not just a simple "streaming" operation. The disk image you're writing to is growing, and you're copying hundreds of thousands of tiny files and their metadata. This does a decent amount of random access over the network, which can slow things down.

As you can see from the speed difference between wired and wireless, it is, indeed, the network that's causing things to run slowly. (Otherwise, it wouldn't have sped up when you went wired!)

Once the first backup is complete and you switch to Smart Update, it's going to be significantly faster.

(Note, too -- if your PC's partition is formatted as FAT32 things will fail: the destination you're storing the image on must support files > 4GB, so it would have to be NTFS.)

Hope that helps.

[Fouster]

Well ok .
First my network drive is formatted in NTFS. So no problem there.
Ok I understood the difference in speed between wired & wireless .
My wired network is 1gigabit.This means 125Mb/s .
Can these random access of tiny files and metadata slow things so much!!
What if I was using an external firewire drive which is 400Mb/s = 50MB/s .
Would I see there too 1,5Mb/s!!??

Seems unreasonable too me.

[dnanian]

No, an external FW drive -- which doesn't run remotely as fast as 50MB/s, that a raw protocol speed -- will run about 6MB/s for a Power PC based mac, and about 12MB/s for an Intel.

We're really not CPU bound, we're I/O bound. And yes, things can slow down that much. But, as I said, Smart Update will be much faster after the first backup is done.