Shirt Pocket Discussions

Shirt Pocket Discussions (https://www.shirt-pocket.com/forums/index.php)
-   General (https://www.shirt-pocket.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=6)
-   -   Copy slowed to a crawl (https://www.shirt-pocket.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7018)

mwkingsandiego 08-03-2016 03:01 PM

Copy slowed to a crawl
 
I knew I had a big backup to do to my home networked drive, so I started the copy late last night, thinking it would complete by morning. Not the first time I've done that and it's worked out ok. Especially after I turned off the "Sleep after 3 hours" setting :)

I watched for a little bit and SuperDuper was clicking thru the files at a good rate. But when I came back this morning, 7 hours later, there was only about 400,000 files done out of about 1,400,000. If I waited seevveeerrraaallll minnnuuuttteeeeesss, I could see the file counter was still clicking over but very slowly. Right now, it's been on the same file while I'm writing this.

So my impression is that in the overnight inactive period SuperDuper got pushed way down in the run time priority, or something like that. Is there a way to recover from this situation? Or do I just give up on the now 12 hours invested and restart the copy? At the current rate, this is going to take about 3 days...

dnanian 08-03-2016 03:11 PM

Seems unlikely - try adding the backup drive to the spotlight preference pane's privacy tab (if you can). Are you running any sort of antivirus?

mwkingsandiego 08-03-2016 03:21 PM

the drive had already been added to the Spotlight privacy exclusion, and there's no significant activity for Spotlight according to Activity Monitor.

And of course I have antivirus - Sophos Home - which hasn't been a problem before.

mwkingsandiego 08-03-2016 03:25 PM

Activity Monitor says SuperDuper is getting .1-.4% of CPU with more than 90% idle...that seems like a problem to me.

dnanian 08-03-2016 04:51 PM

No, the problem is your antivirus, which is scanning every file. Try turning it off. (I'm not sure what the "of course" is - Antivirus is quite uncommon on the Mac, and not really needed at present, given a modicum of caution.)

mwkingsandiego 08-04-2016 12:39 PM

For those interested, the answer is "none of the above." Turned out the destination partition had an old image in it that I didn't know about. The copy ran fine UNTIL the drive got down to reported 0 bytes available. At that point, when I would have expected a warning message, activity slowed to a crawl, although not frozen or anything like that.

After clearing out everything in that partition, S'Duper ran as expected, antivirus and all.

Re antivirus, I've run that for years, and it regularly catches things in email - rigged zip file "invoices" are particularly popular right now. Yes, all but one have been Windoze payloads, but I don't really want to be passing those on to someone even if they do not affect me. And I was once infected by a Mac bug of some sort, rare as that might be. Fortunately, I was able to restore from my few-days-old S'Duper clone and all was well again.

dnanian 08-04-2016 12:44 PM

Ah, well - we do say, in the user's guide, that if you don't have enough space to actually store the image, things can fail catastrophically. This is an example. (If the OS doesn't tell us there's an error writing, we don't know - and while you'd expect it to in this case, well, clearly not. :))

Yes, antivirus regularly "catches" things. But that's why I said a "modicum of caution". If you feel it offers you value, though, by all means continue! Personally, I've never found them very useful.


All times are GMT -4. The time now is 06:03 PM.

Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.9
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.