On Apr 22, 2012, at 11:45 AM, Dinse, Gregg (NIH/NIEHS) [E] wrote:
> Here is my question. If hardly any user files change since the last backup,
> and if all but about 50-gb of my system drive is excluded, how long should
> the entire "backup" process take? If no user files changed, or very few,
> then the backup of my data should not take long, but I'm sure some system
> files are always changing, and I have no idea how long the search for changed
> files might take. Which seems more reasonable -- 1 minute or 12 minutes?
>
> Even if the 1 minute time period is correct, I have no idea why (or when) the
> backups went from taking 12 minutes to only taking 1 minute.
I can't explain the change, but my own backups generally take a minute or two,
at most. This is on a 2008 Mac Pro with source and target disks installed in
the internal drive bays. I've seen similar performance on modern iMacs with
external disks, so I'd say you're good!
The poor performance you're describing is reminiscent of Time Machine on
Leopard (10.5), which was far, far slower - especially on PowerPC G4 hardware,
which usually resulted in the "running constantly" behavior you mentioned, and
which really killed overall system performance, as it consistently gulped up at
least 50% of the CPU on the systems I managed. The situation was vastly
improved under Snow Leopard (10.6), and for PowerPC users on 10.5, I usually
suggest they disable automatic Time Machine backups and run the backup manually
from the Time Machine menulet once a day or so, and that worked out pretty well
in all cases.
Matt_______________________________________________
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