Whole Budgie UI becoming slow while copying files

Hi,

not sure it’s specific to Budgie or Ubuntu or hardware.

An SSD for my system and a HDD for my personal DATAS sit in my computer.

From time to time I do a backup of the folders in my HDD and the /home folder in my SSD onto an external HDD, using commands like
sudo cp -rav /home/* /media/me/externalHDD/one/target/folder/
sudo cp -rav /media/DATA/* /media/me/externalHDD/other/target/folder/

( I know I could put that second HDD in my computer but then it would use energy most of the time for nothing ).

While doing so, each time I noticed the whole Budgie UI becomes unresponsive by moments ( it’s not frozen during the whole process ) from internal HDD to external HDD. It seems not to happen from SSD to external HDD ( or it’s not perceptible enough for me to notice ).

The transferred amount of data
⋅ from internal HDD is about 320 Gb ( with some larger files like videos, audio, etc )
⋅ from SSD is about 32Gb ( mostly hidden files and folders from all users, rather small files ).

Another weird thing ( to my eyes at least ) is that the swap is a bit used during the copying process although the RAM was not at all « full ».


( I know my swap is a bit short )

So… Using the cp command rather than Nemo or Nautilus, I thought the whole copying process would run in kind of background, silly me.

And the transferred data only concern human users - I was not copying system files.

What should I pay attention to for making that copying process « less invasive » on the foreground activities and UI ?

( I’ve checked the process in use, cpu and ram usage and forgot to save or screenshot them - nothing seems eating much anywhere but I could not find any « cp » process )

If I end up with putting that external disc into the computer as a permanent disc, is there a way to keep it « shutdown » and wake it up only when I do the backup ( maybe it already works like this by default ) ?

Try using nice to reduce the priority of the copy process

sudo -i
nice  cp -rav /home/* /media/me/externalHDD/one/target/folder/
1 Like

I’ll try that !

And what about the If I end up with putting that external disc into the computer as a permanent disc, is there a way to keep it « shutdown » ?

In other words, if I put that disc in my machine - without mentioning it in /etc/fstab - what will be its state regarding « power » ? Full-powered when mounted I guess, but while un-mounted ?

With regards to the external disc 'fraid no idea.

Suspect this is more a hardware thing than software I.e. does the disc firmware cause a spin down automatically when it’s not being used.