Daniel
Senior Member
No condescension intended, Bob, but are you absolutely positive that you're connected to a USB2 port and not an old USB1 bus? I made that error myself a few months back on my old Dual G4 where I had built-in USB ports and a board with USB2 ports. The difference is amazing!
While I do use an internal eSATA drive for Time Machine on my Mac Pro (fast...), I, too, bought one of those 250 gb external miniature USB2-only bus--powered hard disks so that I could use Time Machine with my MacBook Pro. The initial copy did indeed last a long time (several hours, as I recall), but once you're past that hurdle, I find that the system is reasonably fast. Of course, it depends how much data has changed, but in practice, and on average, I don't think the hourly backup takes more than a couple of minutes. It also does not hog the CPU so that you can keep working comfortably while the backup is in progress.
Before I replaced my MacBook Pro's 120 gig drive with a 250 gig model, I used to routinely run out of space; without giving it another thought, I'd just trash my iTunes library (
But you are right: a bootable backup is handy, but at best in addition to, not as a replacement for incremental backups.
Just let your USB drive run overnight (and beyond, if need be) to get that first backup done. You should also make sure that the backup drive is not indexed by Spotlight. You will then see that it works well, is very convenient, and completely gets out of your way. All your stuff will be backed up without you having to worry about a thing. Even my wife has a backup of all her files thanks to Time Machine, and it's already come in handy on more than one occasion.
Daniel
