Hard Drive Entire Backup Questions

I am using TI10 to backup of the entire hard drive in my IBM Thinkpad T30 to an external USB drive. I recently did a clean install of XP and all applications so the T30 drive is now only a single partition drive. I prefered to clone the drive so I have a full plug & play backup available but the TI10 "Clone" option will not recognize the USB drive. As I write this I am using the "Backup" option to build an image of the entire native drive on the external USB drive.

-Why does the process to create a complete image and then verify it take so long? It took approximately ten hours to create the image and now the verification process is running. It appears that it will take another 36 to 48 hours to verify the image. It is an 80 GB drive but only 15 GB of space is used. This unreasonably long period of time precludes making regular backups. I do not want to make incremental backups as I want the reliability of a single backup file that can be relatively quickly and easily used to restore the internal drive. Also, why does the verification process take so much longer than the process to create the image?

-Will the image on the USB drive be able to make a bootable replacement drive (i.e. a clone) if the existing drive fails?

- Why won't the "Clone" option recognize the external USB drive when the "Backup" option is able to see and use it?

 

That is a long time for 15 Gb of used space. Is the usb port a type 1 or 2? As long as the Image is of the ENTIRE drive, it will produce a bootable system like the original drive - that's the whole idea of the software.
To get the Clone feature to see the usb drive, try making and using the bootable Rescue CD, boot with it and try the Clone feature from it.

 

It is a USB type 1 port and I was using the bootable Rescue CD.

As it turns out, the entire process took 21 hours. I am going to try to restore to a 20 GB drive I am not using to verify it works.

I am still curious why it took so long.

 

Because the usb is type 1.

 

As Ralphie said because of USB 1.1 and the Linux drivers used in the Bootable Rescue CD are not optimized for your hardware. Try building a BartPE CD http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ with the included TI plugin or one of Mustang's plugins http://www.mechrest.com/plugins/. With BartPE you will have a windows environment and some performance improvement.

 

I am embarrased to admit this but I never took notice of the huge difference in speed between USB 1.1 & 2.0 standards. I just did all of about 30 seconds of research and found that there is an advertised delta of 40X (12Mb/sec vs 480 Mb./sec). Assuming the 480 Mb/sec is achievable, I should be able to backup and verify 15 MB of data in less than 30 minutes; a much more reasonable period of time. To this end, I just ordered a D-Link pcmcia USB 2.0 adapter from Newegg.

Interestingly, my wife has a Dell 8500 laptop which is only of a very slightly newer vintage than my IBM T30. It has native USB 2.0 ports.

Thanks for all of the advice above.