total file count

SuperDuper will make a "clone" type backup. On a USB 3 port, 250 GB should be backed up in about 1 hour or less. I often see speeds of 100 MB/s with SuperDuper, although USB 3 can support much faster throughput. The speed is slowed down by sorting through many small files that need to be backed up.

It is good to have a different type of backup in addition to Time Machine.

If you purchase the license for SuperDuper, you will get the option to update the clone backup to match the source but it is much faster because only changed files are backed up incrementally. This makes incremental backups take minutes, not hours.

Time Machine works best just connected and backing up automatically in the background. You can't change the number of small files in the OS so it's not something to spend time worrying about.

Time Machine (and possibly programs like SuperDuper) can be GREATLY slowed down by the presence of:

• anti-virus, security, network monitoring, or "protection" packages installed [anti-virus can slow things down for Time Machine by 10x or more]
• "cleaner" apps that claim to make the Mac run more efficiently but typically do the opposite
• virtual machines -- these create huge files/folders and just booting into the virtual machine and changing nothing will make it look like the entire thing has to be backed up when programs like Time Machine, SuperDuper, etc. check. It is often best to put those virtual machine files on the "exception" list ("do not back up") and to simply manually copy them to a separate backup disk maybe once a week or so.
• large amounts of never ending network traffic

I'm sure there is a better way but cloning programs (like SuperDuper) tell you this when they make a clone:

| 01:16:41 PM | Info |       Evaluated 1846041 items occupying 472.43 GB (500066 directories, 1332406 files, 13569 symlinks)

| 01:16:41 PM | Info |       Copied  1274198 items totaling  462.14 GB (316785 directories, 1260630 files, 13568 symlinks)

| 01:16:41 PM | Info |       Cloned  464.49 GB of data in 5394 seconds at an effective transfer rate of 86.11 MB/s

See above, roughly 2 million files evaluated. But I'm sure this is an undercount because there are some files that cloning programs ignore. Wondering what you might do with this information. The MacOS has hundreds of thousands of tiny files embedded ...