MacBook Pro installing from old Target mode MBP

Question

Hi
I accidentally gave my 2010 MBP a drink of coffee this morning.
During the 'rescue' I managed to damage my Time Capsule.
MBP was opened up and 'luckily', my initial action in turning the MBP upside down seems to have resulted in minimal ingress of liquid inside the box.
Only one obvious droplet inside case, although leaving on its side did show a very slight weeping from the video hinge.
The obvious damage was the screen was dead although video to an external screen was fine.
A visit to the Genius Bar ended up with me coming home with a new MBP.
Time Capsule is definitely US. Plugging into the Techs MBP showed the physical disk ok, but the virtual TC volume wouldn't repair when tried.
so Apple won't work on the old machine without a good backup or with me signing away my rights.
The old MBP will boot, but the Genius Bar tech suggested it might be better to boot in Target Disk mode, cable the 2 MBPs together on FireWire, and try to restore the new from the old as an external disk.
So I've set that up and it's running, but the time estimates look huge. It's estimating another 4.5 hours just to copy my user documents.
It's got over 300gb on the old disk.
How long should it take to copy it all over to the new disk, on FireWire?

Answer 1

The time estimates are often misleading and tend to become realistic about 20 - 30 minutes after the start.  Do not be discouraged, yet.  I have witnessed initial estimates in the 'teens' but settle down  to a few.  It will be a function of the amount of data to be transferred.
Ciao.