I attempted my initial backup last night ...

[jreffner]

I'm having a "ditto" problem too. SD! works extremely slowly which it didn't do a few days ago. Checking the CPU usage shows me that two processes called "ditto" are using nearly 100% of my CPUs. I quit them and then Norton AntiVirus and VirusBarrier begin to take huge chunks of CPU, but weren't before I killed the dittos. Checking Apple's site for ditto, I learn that it is apparently something built into the OS which allows copying. So, I'm assuming that SD! taps into this to work its magic. Am I correct?

Why would this problem suddenly crop up since everything worked a few days ago?

Things that immediately come to mind are a VirusBarrier update of its virus defs and a system wide crash caused by my 3 year old who turned off the power to my APC unit. However, I immediately rebooted to a bootable iPod and ran DiskWarrior which fixed the drive.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Jim

[dnanian]

You shoudl really turn your AntiVirus off while running SD! or -- at the very least -- exclude the entire backup volume from scanning.

"ditto" is used as a 3rd level "sanity check" when two other APIs we use to do the copy fail. The log should indicate what file is having problems.

[jreffner]

Dave,

Thanks for the quick reply! You are clearly one of the best guys/companies for support. You're right up there with Serbian (MPEG 4Works) and Ben Spink (CrushFTP)!

Anyway, Ok I'll take care of the AntiVirus apps, but can you tell me why this was never a problem before? I've had both AV apps on this Mac & SD! for a very long time and have never run into this issue before. Any ideas?

Something has obviously changed.

Thanks,

Jim

[dnanian]

We've always indicated that AV applications can cause problems, Jim. They might be intermittent sometimes, but they're definitely trouble.

[chezstewart]

NEWBIE HAVING SLOW 1ST COPY
Even with all other Apps closed, it is taking more than 48 hours as the copy is slowly being created.
Is this normal? Using Superduper 1.5.5 to backup a MacOS X 10.2.8 external hard drive thru USB.
Next time I will try to rewire if I can find a way to use only firewire. What is the speed difference?
Used APPLICATIONS>UTILITIES>PROCESS VIEWER to show how CPU resources were being used. Only 13% of CPU for Superduper, also for TruBluEnv. Hiding SD with cmd H seemed to help a little.
But two days to copy less than 120 MB?
Gordon 4/8/07
++++
For some reason, my account now only allows me to edit previous posts;
new ones disallowed, But Thanks!

Here is what I wanted to post:
The most important thing I learned about backing up with Superduper is that after needing to interrupt a very slow (days) backup of a disk that has gradually climbed to appear at about 90 percent complete, the remaining files can be copied over using this (excerpt from Superduper website):
Choose it as the destination, ensure that Smart Update... is selected as the During copy method in the Options... page, and Start Copying: again, SuperDuper will treat the image like any other drive, and automatically update the image with the changes.

While this may seem obvious, for newbies it might take a while to discover the “smart update” option.
Gordon 5/16/07

[dnanian]

This really isn't much of a surprise; your Mac is old enough to support USB 2.0, so it's running at < 1Mb/s. FireWire is always better, and in this situation the difference will be pretty huge!