Calculate a large data copy?

[dstranathan]

I need to move a lot of business critical data in a small window. How can I calculate the move most effective? Are there calculators that can do this?


Source:

600 GB (Illustator, text, and Photoshop files. LOTS of sub directories (10+ sub folders per root folder structure.). 7200 RPM ATA/133 drives connected to FireWire 800.

Copy method:

FireWire 800 enclosures. ATA/133 drives (see above)

Destination:

Xserve RAID (RAID 5) 7200 RPM SATA backplane. Xserve dual 2.3 GHz with 2 GB RAM. RAID has Fiber connection. Source drives will be on Xserve's FireWire 800 bus.

I'd like to have a good, fairly accurate ballpark time window estimated for the data transfer.

[AllInOne]

I recently installed a FW800 drive on an G5/2Ghz Xserve that I administer.

I used Retrospect to back up the files to a retrospect archive.

Here is a snippet from my log:

- 3/9/2005 2:26:29 PM: Copying Shared Items on RAID 80…
* Separating file backup set:
Data file name: Daily Backup 800
Catalog file name: Daily Backup 800.cat
3/9/2005 2:59:46 PM: Execution completed successfully.
Completed: 122299 files, 28.6 GB
Performance: 976.4 MB/minute
Duration: 00:33:17 (00:03:21 idle/loading/preparing)

If your speed is comparable to mine it looks like you might have 10 hours of transfer time!

Tho this is not apples to apples as you would be doing a simple copy instead of an archive. Also my source is a pair of striped internal SATA drives. Also I am 1x2Ghz while you are 2x2.3Ghz.

You might be able to do it faster on the command line with ditto or cp or psync, if you can figure out how to make sure resource forks are preserved, dot files are handled properly, dates are preserved etc etc, in all I think Retrospect is the way to go.

Retrospect Express probably even came with your Firewire drive, it did with mine.