Using Mirror to back up Dropbox - questions about speed

[Emma_b89]

Hi everyone :) Thank you in advance for your help. I am using FreeFileSync for the first time in order to create a backup of my entire Dropbox folder to an external hard drive. I am using the Mirror feature, on a Mac.

There are about 40,000 files/a total of about 350GB data to back up. I believe that files are being temporarily downloaded locally from Dropbox in order to be synced. FreeFileSync shows it will take 3.5 days to synchronise for this initial backup. Sometimes this shoots up to 11 days, but mostly shows 3.5 days. It IS making progress, but 3.5 days seems quite slow.

If it doesn't finish up within this time I'm trying to figure whether it'll speed things up significantly to drop my laptop to a neighbours house who has slightly faster internet speed (not preferable as ill be without the laptop) or whether I just wait for the backup to finish running.

I am not a total luddite but I am not advanced by any means, so please excuse my lack of technical knowledge with these questions, and I will likely only be able to understand replies in layman's terms sorry!

1) Is this length of time about average for an initial backup of this amount of files/data?

2) If not, is it to do with my internet speed being too slow? I use Starlink and it is currently 260Mbs (but sometimes 126Mbs) download speed, and 9.62Mbs upload.

Or could it more likely be:
- the cable I use to connect my hard drive to my laptop (a standard USB cable with a USBC adapter),
- that I’m using the free version of FreeFileSync,
- That I have used CloudMounter to mount my dropbox as a local drive (I just had it set up that way at the time - I hope this is not affecting anything because I imagine ill have to stop the entire thing, change the directory to Dropbox rather than the CloudMounter local drive, and start the whole thing again...)

3) At one point, I got an error ‘no such directory..’. My internet connection does sometimes drop out briefly. Would this have been my internet dropping out, and because the files are online only on dropbox, FreeFileSync couldn’t find the directory? If this is the case, and it happens again, is there a way to get FreeFileSync to try again by itself after a period of time rather than me having to manually prompt it to try again?

4) I assume that after this initial backup, the Mirror process will not take as long in the future - I plan to run FreeFileSync once a month or so, and it’ll likely be dealing with a maximum of 50 odd files to add (either images or 10-20min 4K videos) and perhaps some to delete now and again. Is that correct or will I have to go thru the entire process every time?

Thank you!