new external hard drive, takes forever to do anything.

So I had a 500 gb lacie external hard drive that was using firewire 400 for transfers and is formatted as Mac OS Extended (journaled) But I've filled that hard drive now. I got a new toshiba 1 TB hard drive that is using usb to connect and is formatted as MS-DOS (FAT). It is taking FOREVER to do anything. I'm just trying to back up my mac using time machine. It's been going for 14 hours now and has backed up 22.9 Gigs.

Can someone help me make this go faster?

Unless you need fat32 for a PC also, reformat it to HFS Extended(Journaled) with Disk Utility. Might speed it up a little.

I tried by erasing it but it keeps having an error.

TM requires an HFS+ formatted drive so I'm not sure how you're using TM with a FAT32 drive. Are you sure that the drive is formatted as FAT?

I'm positive. I want to erase the hard drive so i can reformat it but its still giving me the error

Which error is that? It's hard to help if we don't know what that is.

disk erase failed with the error: file system formatter failed

Take a look at this thread from the Apple Discussion boards.

Backup start: 0820
Progress at 0830: 212 mb
Progress at 0840: 4.8 GB
Progress at 0850: 7.6 GB
Progress at 0900: 8 GB
What is going on? haha

o8strider8o said:

Backup start: 0820
Progress at 0830: 212 mb

Click to expand...

Which part of:

TM requires an HFS+ formatted drive

Click to expand...

...did you not get...?

baggss said:

Which part of:



...did you not get...?

Click to expand...

I reformatted it to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) Which I believe is HFS+...

o8strider8o said:

I reformatted it to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) Which I believe is HFS+...

Click to expand...

Ah, you didn't say that.

USB, even USB 2, is pretty slow for backups.

Copying many small files will take longer than copying one large file. This is my guess as to why you notice such a difference in the amount transferred. It is possible that TM is copying large files now.