MyCloud Mirror - Soooooooo SLOW!

MyCloud Mirror 4TB - all firmware up-to-date

Connecting iMac directly through a Virgin Superhub…

Copying a 1.41 GB folder from iMac to MCM…estimated time 3 days!  

What am doing wrong?  Surely this can’t be right?

Please help…I’ve been trying to sort this off my own bat all morning  but no joy!


Ok so I stopped the transfer…I don’t have a spare 3 days…I am now trying to delete the files…6,501 in total and so far its taken 7 mins and still 4500 to go!!!  I MUST have got something wrong here but what ?  Surely think £400 drive can’t be this slow!

Does sound slow - simplest first check is connect the MCM directly to the iMac’s ethernet port (presuming it has one) and see what speed you get with a direct connection. 

That’ll show if the MCM itself has an issue or if it’s something in the superhub, and should also allow you to get your folder copied over more quickly.

This is an area that was concerning me.

I have just bought a 4TB Mirror (i.e. 2 x 8TB drives) and copied my Aperture Vault (170GB) to the drive. It took 2 days, although the Mirror estimated a much longer time when it started.

It is now, another 2 days on, still indexing the Vault, presumably as it has potentially thousands of files.

I tried some smaller transfers - 1 to 5GB and they were no more than tens of minutes.

There is obviously an issue with large files, but specifically with large NUMBERS of files.

So:

  1. Is your 1.41Gb folder consistening of an unusually large number of files?

  2. Can you try any other transfers between devices? I did this across my wi-fi to ‘benchmark’ it and was getting 0.5Gb per minute consistently, using various video files of 0.5 to 10Gb (but note SINGLE files of whatever size).

You are correct RJKflyer

It’s a font archive folder called Fonts - 35,000 files

I test copies a 1.6GB single file in less than a minute!

So…

I selected the Fonts folder

Right Clicked and selected Compress “Fonts”

This made a zip archive in 4 mins

I copied this to MCM (less than a minute)  GREAT NEWS!!!

Not so fast…thats when it has al slowed up!!!  It started to uncompress then after about 8 mins…

Archive Utility

Error Unable to expand “fonts.zip” into *****

(Error 13 - Permission Denied)

I am sooooo grumpy!! Now

What “started (it) to uncompress”?

Do you mean you copied it back to the iMac and tried to uncompress it and it failed?

So how long should it take?

I just backed up two drives: my 60 GB SSD and my “file hog” (data, docs, pictures, etc) which has about 140 GB.  It took 50 hours non stop.  I was using a non-WD program, Handy Backup, because I’ve had it for years and used it with my WD Passport 1TB backup. 

I’m hoping the incremental backups go orders of magnitude faster because that was agonizing. 

Is there anyway to really estimate how long it should take?  In the case of that “Fonts” directory, yeah that’s painful, but it’s not like I’ve added a font or two in years.  It will only happen once.

The comparison, though, is I had the MYCloud in place while installing the new SSD and just copied folders full of files over to the MYCloud in a couple of minutes.  Not 52 hours, not even 52 minutes. 

Now, even though I’m not doing anything to it - NO copying going on - the two drive lights are flickering a few times per second.

Bob

To update on my experience.

2 days to copy 160Gb Aperture Vault, which has thousands of files.

Another 2 days to ‘index’ it.

The drive and lights are now silent/off… …for the first time since I bought the drive on Dec 29th!

What will now be interesting is IF i can ‘update’ the Vault - and this will answer CFLBob’s question about incremental updates being hopefully much quicker.

I can almost answer that.  My incremental backup started at 5:30.  At almost 2 1/2 hours in, Handy Backup says it’s 21% done.  I think I’m looking at another overnighter. 

My guess is that the indexing or whatever it was doing (that caused the drive lights to flicker) never finished and it’s doing all sorts of things. 

Count me as rather annoyed at how slow it is.

Bob

Yes, I am now tending towards something eing very poorly engineereed: I yesterday queried the Aperture Vault to see how big it was: 18 hours later I am no closer to knowing and I’ve had 18 hours of drive activity.

So, it spent 2 days indexing and knows nothing after that.

Looks like this might have to go back - it’s useless like this.

And, worse stil, I can’t eject the disk as 'the Finder is still using it". 

I went to bed with mine at about 50% complete and 6 1/2 hours.  When I was up at 13 hours to feed the cat, it was done but probably close to that 13 hours.  For an incremental backup.  Two days later.  Not much changed. 

My front panel LEDs are still flickering a few times per second. 

What puzzles me was that I could grab whole directories out of my drive in Windows Explorer and copy them over in minutes.  I can’t understand what else it’s doing that takes two days. 

I’m finding that indexing is what takes over once the copying is dne, and that takes as long as the copying…

How do you see that?  I connect to the drive by IP address and can see the “Device Activity” display; that tells you what percent duty the CPUs and RAM are doing, along with a list of processes it’s doing (like Windows Task Manager), but can’t tell what the processes are. 

Your network must be very slow.

I can copy 10gb in about 30 mins at most.

A full 210gb time machine back up from scratch was less than 20 hours. (that includes building database of files needed)

I can copy 10 GB in no time.  The back-up of about the size you quote (210 GB) took 50 hours.  That’s a first time backup, not the incremental, and should take longer.  Is your 210 GB in 20 hours a first time backup (sounded like it) or incremental?  My incremental backup took about 12 or 13 hours, after one day.  I swear I didn’t do much that would have changed. 

My network is Ethernet from my PC to my Linksys EA6500 network hub, and then directly to the MyCloud.  I think it’s 10/100, but I’m not really sure.  

I haven’t ruled out anything, but when I had a WD Passport terabyte, my incremental backups took under two hours weekly, not nightly, on USB2.  It was easily 100x faster than this system.

  EDITED 2100 EST.  Improve understandability.  My original was pretty poorly written. 

Why do I think it’s indexing, not copying: because after two days copying it finally stopped activity. Then after several hours of inactivity, I interrogated the Valut size, and I then endured another two days of disk activity. No files were moved for that one at all.

I have given up ever expecting to know the file size of the Vault as the thing has never stopped activity since that enquiry. It’s still going now!

This all appears to be down to anything that has large numbers of constituent parts: my experience shows that genuinely single files copy at an acceptable speed, but anyhtig with complex ‘package contents’ or folder contents is extremely poor.

Bob - so I seem to mirror, no pun intended, your initial backup speed exoerience, although my subsequent incremental backup (with Aperture vault) appeared to be of more normal timeproportions. My conditions were simlar - an initial backup of 160GB (2 days) and a subsequent incremental update of 20-50 files which took short enough time to be done between going to do somehting and coming back to my desk.

Obviously I understand your issue in that it is highly likley that your incremental backups will start running into each other…!

RJKflyer wrote:

Why do I think it’s indexing, not copying: because after two days copying it finally stopped activity. Then after several hours of inactivity, I interrogated the Valut size, and I then endured another two days of disk activity. No files were moved for that one at all.

 

I have given up ever expecting to know the file size of the Vault as the thing has never stopped activity since that enquiry. It’s still going now!

 

This all appears to be down to anything that has large numbers of constituent parts: my experience shows that genuinely single files copy at an acceptable speed, but anyhtig with complex ‘package contents’ or folder contents is extremely poor.

 

Bob - so I seem to mirror, no pun intended, your initial backup speed exoerience, although my subsequent incremental backup (with Aperture vault) appeared to be of more normal timeproportions. My conditions were simlar - an initial backup of 160GB (2 days) and a subsequent incremental update of 20-50 files which took short enough time to be done between going to do somehting and coming back to my desk.

 

Obviously I understand your issue in that it is highly likley that your incremental backups will start running into each other…!

 

I had set mine up to do an incremental every day, but I started thinking that maybe the reason it took 12 or 13 hours to do the first one was that it needed to finish its indexing (or whatever it was doing that made the LEDs flicker).  So I told it to wait until tomorrow and do an incremental every 3 days.  A little while ago, I saw both blue LEDs were on but solid and not flickering, so I opened my backup program and it said it wasn’t doing anything.  Windows Task Manager told a different story: it said the backup program was very busy.  Something like 50% processor load. 

And then it stopped and the blue drive 1 and drive 2 LEDs are off for the first time since New Year’s Eve. 

I don’t know.,. maybe I’ll dump the third party app (Handy Backup) and do something different.  To me, the real puzzle was why I could manually copy my entire drive - about 200 GB - to the MyCloud and I swear it didn’t take an hour, but to run the backup program took 50 hours and another 3 days of flickering lights.