OS X 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard) back up very slow! Should I cancel Time Machine on the first back up?
My Time Machine was "Checking Changes or Updates" (http://pondini.org/TM/D1.html) or something to that affect and hasn't backed up for 63 days ... even though I've pressed the button to do so ... so I looked up some troubleshooting notes (Pondini seems to know it all thank goodness! – http://pondini.org/TM/D2.html) that suggested I check Spotlight to see if it was indexing. It was. After doing a few other things I got to the point where I used Disk Utility to "Repair Disk" for my back up drive which more or less said it could not be fixed and I needed to make a new back up. I bought myself a new external hard drive (WD My Book Live) but unfortunately did what the instructions told me to (attach the hard drive via an Ethernet cable to my router – WiFi) instead of just connecting it straight to my computer via the Ethernet cable. I'm gathering that it would be much quicker/faster speed to attach it straight to my computer .... does anyone know? I'm on a desktop computer with OS X 10.6.8 (1 TB Capacity – 517 GB of that has been used).
I've been backing up for 2 days now and it's done 130.37 GB of 505.51 GB. I'm wondering if I should cancel the back up and start again with the external hard drive connected directly into my computer via the Ethernet cable. That's what I've been doing in the past. I've been looking at Troubleshooting notes and it mostly suggests that it's not good to cancel the initial (first) back up. I've also seen these notes (http://pondini.org/TM/29.html) that suggest that this is the slowest method that I'm using ... I'm almost tempted to go out and buy another hard drive (WD My Book Studio or WD My Book for Mac) with USB connection rather than Ethernet connection and write off the one I'm using as a manual store for my music / photos ...
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. My plan was to rid a lot of the stuff I have on my computer (to a hard drive) anyhow once it had backed up.