Hung fire

Which is what the sun did on Friday.  Coming back from the lovely New Blue and White exhibit at the MFA, I found a midsummer fair going on by the Yard, with morris-dancing and ice cream and telescopes.  There's a new sort of mylar now which lets you look straight at the sun.  I queued for some while to look at sunspots, because that's awesome--and just as I reached the head of the line, the sun set.  Damn.

Meanwhile, Time Machine is hanging fire as well.  As I said, I partitioned the new drive.  Transfer to the archival half goes at about 1 GB/minute:  not blazing, but respectable.  Via Time Machine, data moves at 1GB/hour--which is insane.  At that rate, it would take about three weeks to back up what I've got, running 24/7.  I've told my iMac not to sleep, but none the less, it's blinked twice, and started the whole thing all over again from square one.

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?  I understand that this is a complex process, and I expected it to take, I don't know, two or three times as long as just copying.  Not 60.  Should I just give up and copy manually?

Reminds me of that old joke about the airplane:  they're over the Atlantic, and things keep failing.  At each new malfunction, there are reassurances from the crew, regrets for the unavoidable delay.  They're going slower and slower now, laboring to fly.  Finally, one guy turns to the other and says, "Gosh, if that last engine catches fire, we'll be up here all night."

Nine