After wondering why a full backup of my computer (15Gb, porn and music included) was taking so long (around six or seven hours) I decided it was time to make some changes.
First try: Switch from backing up the computer onto an USB external drive to backing up the computer to an internal drive in another computer over a network. Result: Faster backup, but still about four hours.
Second try: backing up the computer over the network to a Non-Windows computer. Result: Faster still, but three and a half hours is still too much.
Third try: rewrite portions of the backup script to leave out unimportant bits (porn and music are still considered important) like temp files and such. While I was digging through the script, I decided to look into just how fast USB should be. 480 Mb/second. That's rather fast, but I was only getting about 10Mb/second. Hmm...
"Oh, that's a rather sucky little USB hub there, isn't it. What happens if I connect the USB drive to the computer directly?" Apparently my Powerbook has USB2.0, so does the USB drive, but the USB hub doesn't. Sucky.
Now I'm getting backups as fast as possible, but still taking about an hour for a complete backup. I can live with that, actually. Incremental backups are ridiculously faster now.
I'm a happy camper.
Comments (2)
You do realise that the throughput of a data rate is probably a 1/10th of what the protocol claims.
I mean the best data rates I've ever seen on 100 base T ethernet is about 7MB/sec across a network. (not to say that isn't blindingly fast).
Posted by majeric | March 17, 2004 7:49 AM
Posted on March 17, 2004 07:49
I would really like to say your blog wasn't that geeky, but then I'd be a lying liar who lies. :)
Posted by Jo | March 17, 2004 10:05 PM
Posted on March 17, 2004 22:05