Topic Split: very very slow backup

[samwirtz]

Hi all !

 

Just installed Retrospect 8 on a PowerMac G5 Dual 1,8 with a Lacie 4Big 8TB connected through FW800 ... ok, not the fastest, but as a standalone backup server it should do the job. It is backing up several OSX and WinXP clients through a gigabit network ... THIS THING IS WAY SLOW !!! I get transfer rates around 60MB/min .... I remember AFP transfers of 30MB/second (that's 1800 MB/min !) with that machine.

OK i thought ... maybe the guys at EMC did not pay to much attention to PowerPC coding ... let's try a crappy Mac Mini 1.8 Core Duo, Lacie raid hooked up by FW400 only ... transfer speed around 450 MB/min. HMMM not so bad, but still half the speed of my old Retrospect 6 running on a 933MHz PowerMac G4, which does around 1GB/min on exactly the same clients. So the client software is not the issue here !!!

Processor load is quite low (around 30%) an RAM usage too....

SO WHY THE HECK IS RETROSPECT 8 SO SLOW ???

 

[CRE]

This is a link to a Knowledge Base Article.

 

http://kb.dantz.com/article.asp?article=9707&p=2

 

We also upgrade to Retrospect 8.1 because it was compatible with PowerPc G5 has state on the system requirement of the 8.1 version;

 

" Retrospect 8 console (manages the engine)

Intel or Power PC G4 or G5 processor

Mac OS X 10.5.5 or later..."

 

" Retrospect 8 engine (Minimum requirements)(performs the backups and restores)

Intel processor, Power PC G5 processor, or dual Power PC G4 processors running at 867 MHz or faster

Mac OS X 10.4.11 or 10.5.5 or later..."

 

We spend a lot of time to figure out why the very poor speed of it, the inabilities to run backup and so on. Useless for us.

 

But in Knowledge Base, different story! we found;

" For the initial release of Retrospect 8, the Retrospect console and engine do not run on PowerPC machines; this ability will be added in a future update."

 

 

Our organisation feel abuse by this situation.

 

[jel]

Just because your (still) using PowerPC machines, don't feel your being discriminated against. Even an octuple core Mac Pro with oodles of RAM, and backing up to eSATA hard disks via a 6Gbps capable PCI card no less, is just as slow.

 

It literally is faster to watch paint dry than watch Retrospect running. Retrospect building a snapshot is particularly painfull to watch since there is no network activity, hardly any disk activity, and even taking in to account that Retrospect in general is incapable of using multiple CPU cores, it is (for hours) only using 1.4% of a single CPU core.

 

I have already switched one company away from using Retrospect due to its truly pitiful speed. They now use SuperDuper and are deliriously happy. They with SuperDuper are still able to have a rotating set of backups (keeping most off-site).

[scsctech]

SuperDuper seems great for a single machine and single backup, but for huge clusters of computers and big NAS and tape backup systems, my only replacement for Retrospect that worked well was BRU

[jel]

SuperDuper seems great for a single machine and single backup, but for huge clusters of computers and big NAS and tape backup systems, my only replacement for Retrospect that worked well was BRU

 

Retrospect has a great feature set. Even with the current crop of glitches, it is also reasonably reliable. It is just so slooooooow as to be considered 'cruel and unusual punishment'.

 

I have considered BRU, but its support for using hard disks as a backup medium is effectively non-existant. A much lesser issue was that it unlike Retrospect and most other backup tools of equivalence does not do 'data-deduplication'.

 

As I said Retrospect has the features, it just is getting so slow it would almost be as quick to manually type a load of unix CP commands in Terminal.