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Author Topic: Excruciatingly slow Copying or Saving Files on Mac OSX 11 - Big Sur  (Read 503 times)

pflower

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My venerable late 2015 27 inch iMac died - or at least the hard disk did. So I managed to find from the Apple Refurbished Store a 2019 27 inch iMac which is the last machine that Apple made that can run 32 bit applications since it will boot up in Mojave (10.14.6)  - which for the moment I still need. But it came with Big Sur - v 11.6.1.

My backup system is pretty basic - External SATA (formatted in Mac OS Journaled) drives in Intatek docking stations - not high tek but works for me.  So I have two drives connected via USBC to the new iMac and drag 74GB of files to a new disk via the finder and it says that it will take 7hours to copy.  After 5 minutes I believed it.  Booting up in Mojave and copying the same files again it took 7 minutes.  I did clone a 4TB via Super Duper in Big Sur - it took close to 48 hours to finalise.

I am now cloning the same drive via Mojave - same drives (well an extra drive as a backup) and to date SuperDuper has been running for 90 minutes and has copied 716GB at a reported 132 Mb/s.  So what is going on with Big Sur - I have noticed that saving files of about 240MB via Photoshop is also painfully slow.

Any one else experiencing this - would updating to new operating system help, but this is absurd.

Any thoughts
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BobShaw

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Re: Excruciatingly slow Copying or Saving Files on Mac OSX 11 - Big Sur
« Reply #1 on: November 24, 2021, 05:04:08 pm »

I can't comment on the copy speed as I am not at Big Sur yet, no no doubt soon will be.
However the solution for needing to run older applications is VMware Fusion.
I run Catalina with a window for Mojave and one for El Capitan and one even for Snow Leopard 10.6.
Bob
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pflower

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Re: Excruciatingly slow Copying or Saving Files on Mac OSX 11 - Big Sur
« Reply #2 on: November 27, 2021, 12:47:39 pm »

Interesting.  I'll look into that, but I was told that it is not the operating system that restricts the use of earlier operating systems but the hardware.  Apparently my 2019 27 inch iMac is the last machine that can run earlier operating systems and thus start up with Mojave and earlier OSX - at least that is what Apple Sales told me.

As regards the slowness of copying, looking on various google searches I came across the suggestion that Spotlight could be the problem.  Since I have some 20TB of photographs on several external hard drives (including backups) it is possible that Spotlight was trying to index them.  I have excluded them in Spotlight's preferences and things do seem to be reasonably normal again.


I can't comment on the copy speed as I am not at Big Sur yet, no no doubt soon will be.
However the solution for needing to run older applications is VMware Fusion.
I run Catalina with a window for Mojave and one for El Capitan and one even for Snow Leopard 10.6.
Bob
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BobShaw

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Re: Excruciatingly slow Copying or Saving Files on Mac OSX 11 - Big Sur
« Reply #3 on: November 28, 2021, 01:22:14 am »

Interesting.  I'll look into that, but I was told that it is not the operating system that restricts the use of earlier operating systems but the hardware.  Apparently my 2019 27 inch iMac is the last machine that can run earlier operating systems and thus start up with Mojave and earlier OSX - at least that is what Apple Sales told me.
The "host" operating system is what the computer boots up with. That can be anything provided it is compatible with the VMware Fusion version that you are using.
Fusion is an application that runs on the host and lets you run "guest" operating systems, of which there are lots, not just Mac but Windows, Linux etc.

See this
https://store-au.vmware.com/fusion_buy_dual_new?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=engine:google%7Ccampaignid:297445804%7Cadid:481059117345%7Cgclid:EAIaIQobChMIiuK6k7S69AIVYJpmAh1HSwYbEAAYAiAAEgKa8vD_BwE&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIiuK6k7S69AIVYJpmAh1HSwYbEAAYAiAAEgKa8vD_BwE

Looks like the price has gone up a lot though, but they now offer a free version. You only need the cheapest version anyway.
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