Backup takes ages...is this right?

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Greetings
I have an iMac 1.83 with 2GB Ram, and have just tried to back up music and photos to iDisk. How long should it take? I guessed that it was in a loop and cancelled after about two hours. This is the first backup that I've tried and the amount of data is relatively trifling.. Any thoughts would be welcomed. Cheers Mitcherooney
 
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15" Unibody MBP 2.4 Ghz C2D, 2 GB RAM, 250 GB HDD, 320 GB Time Machine HDD, 1 TB Ext Media Drive
In order to know if your backup time is reasonable, we need to know HOW MUCH data you are trying to backup. If your music library is only a few MB, yes, 2 hours is WAY too long. However, if you've got a 5 GB music database and 500 MB of photos, depending on your connection speed, I would expect an iDisk backup to take the better part of a day.
 
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Mitcherooney
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Thanks for the speedy reply. I take the point about how much data being relevant. Having just checked, there IS about 3Gig music and 500 odd Mb photos. I am surprised that this amount takes so much time. The iDisk set up allows for much more space than I have, so how do people manage when they have stacks of data? Do most people just forget about iDisk and use an external HD for backup purposes? Cheers M
 
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Your Mac's Specs
15" Unibody MBP 2.4 Ghz C2D, 2 GB RAM, 250 GB HDD, 320 GB Time Machine HDD, 1 TB Ext Media Drive
As you might see from my Mac specs on the left, I've got 120 GB internal on my MBP, a 320 GB External drive that I use for Leopard's Time Machine drive (backs up everything once an hour, by default), and a 320 GB media drive.

I store my 60 GB music library on my internal drive since I am constantly changing it, and resyncing my iPod...takes much less time to sync an iPod if the files it needs are on the internal drive.

I keep my 120+ GB of video files on the external media drive, and the iTunes music library just points to this location for all video (Movies, TV Shows, etc). I also keep a backup of my music library here on this drive.

The Time Machine drive keeps Leopard's backups on it, which obviously includes backups of my music library.

All in all, my music library is stored internally and backed up to 2 locations externally. My home folder with photos, docs, etc is internal and backed up to both locations. The only thing not redundant is my videos folder, since I just don't have the space to back it up...and videos are far less important to me than my music library.

The only thing I use iDisk backup for is Personal Settings and my Home folder minus the music/video aspects. This backs up my photos, web pages, docs, etc to iDisk.
 
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Personally I don't use iDisk at all, and I haven't upgraded to Leopard on any of my Mac's.

I use iBackup and an external harddrive, find it to be the best solution.

iDisk is known to be really slow here in Norway, but I guess that's mostly an latency issue as I'd guess the iDisk servers are only located in the US!?
 

bobtomay

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15" MBP '06 2.33 C2D 4GB 10.7; 13" MBA '14 1.8 i7 8GB 10.11; 21" iMac '13 2.9 i5 8GB 10.11; 6S
Part of the issue may be on the Apple side of the backup. But mostly it will be on your side as the upload speed of most internet providers is only a fraction of the download speeds. Upload speeds on some will be as slow as dial up speeds. And all initial backups are going to take a while. Once that is done and just uploading your new stuff, it will go much faster.
 

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