There's no point asking somebody else how long it takes and thinking it will take the same amount of time to backup your hard disk. The time taken is completely dependent on how much data you are copying.
You might find somebody with a 120GB hard disk says it takes 20 minutes to back up, but they may not have mentioned that they only have 20GB of data on the hard disk.
As a rule of thumb for G4 computers, they seem to take about an hour to copy 60GB of data via FireWire. If you have a 60GB hard disk but only 30GB of it is used, it'll take about half an hour. If you have a 250GB hard disk and it's completely full, you're looking at about 4 hours to back it up. I have no experience with G5 computers so maybe they are faster, but maybe the speed limitation is due to FireWire itself. If you are also verifying the data while it's being copied, that will also increase the time taken do perform a backup simply because the computer must complete more steps.
I have also noticed that 10.3 has much faster file copying than 10.4, but that could be due to Spotlight indexing and metadata overheads.
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Why does it take so long? - Crazy Dave
There's no point asking somebody else how long it takes and thinking it will take the same amount of time to backup your hard disk. The time taken is completely dependent on how much data you are copying.You might find somebody with a 120GB hard disk says it takes 20 minutes to back up, but they may not have mentioned that they only have 20GB of data on the hard disk.
As a rule of thumb for G4 computers, they seem to take about an hour to copy 60GB of data via FireWire. If you have a 60GB hard disk but only 30GB of it is used, it'll take about half an hour. If you have a 250GB hard disk and it's completely full, you're looking at about 4 hours to back it up. I have no experience with G5 computers so maybe they are faster, but maybe the speed limitation is due to FireWire itself. If you are also verifying the data while it's being copied, that will also increase the time taken do perform a backup simply because the computer must complete more steps.
I have also noticed that 10.3 has much faster file copying than 10.4, but that could be due to Spotlight indexing and metadata overheads.
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Wednesday, June 04 2008 @ 08:04 PM PDT