duration of backup ...

[149047]

hi everyone!
last night i tried to make a w7 backup of my entire pc on an external 1gig firewire hd
(5 partitions on three drivers -> some 900 gigabytes altogether)
this morning i found that only 25 percent of the entire job were completed. ie: are 2-3 days the usual ammount of time a complete backup can take?

thanks for reading
markus

my version: w7 7100 64bit

 

[zigzag3143]

hi everyone!
last night i tried to make a w7 backup of my entire pc on an external 1gig firewire hd
(5 partitions on three drivers -> some 900 gigabytes altogether)
this morning i found that only 25 percent of the entire job were completed. ie: are 2-3 days the usual ammount of time a complete backup can take?

thanks for reading
markus

my version: w7 7100 64bit

Ummm Its a lot of info, a really log of data. You might want to break it into seperate jobs, and use a third party app like Acronis (much faster). My OS backup is 25 gigs and done over USB 2 so it is slower than firewire but takes abt 25 minutes with verify.

On the subject of restoring. You are probably not going to want to restore the entire 900 gigs and if its taking this long to backup it will take that long to restore nless you are using incremental

But it is taking a long time

Ken

 

[pparks1]

Another question for me would be what type of restore would you be looking for in the event of a crash?

If you are fine with reinstalling your OS and your applications and your backup is pretty much just for the data....you might want to look at something like robocopy....which is a Microsoft tool that I use for most of my data backups. It just simply copies everything from a specified location to a backup location. However, it only copies files that have changed since the last time that you ran it. So, the first copy obviously takes time...but subsequent copies are very fast. If you are looking for a quick, click and restore everything and get my machine back to exactly how it was 10 minutes ago....a tool like this is not the right one.

 

[149047]

well for me its all about saving data - i have lots of photos, images and music files. thats why i figured it would make sense to let win7 backup the entire pc.
markus

 

[zigzag3143]

well for me its all about saving data - i have lots of photos, images and music files. thats why i figured it would make sense to let win7 backup the entire pc.
markus

Im a strong believer in backing up. Win 7 built in backup isn't the most robust. I personally dont use it. the most frequent thing to break is the OS partition. I back that up daily. First to another drive on another computer. For data I do it less often and have 3 different sets. One on another computer, one online, and one in a different location.

It really does make sense to backup your important stuff with whatever method you choose. Just make sure you stick to it religiously.

Breaking it up into pieces makes it less taxing on your machine, and less taxing to restore

Ken

 

[SquonkSC]

hi everyone!
last night i tried to make a w7 backup of my entire pc on an external 1gig firewire hd
(5 partitions on three drivers -> some 900 gigabytes altogether)
this morning i found that only 25 percent of the entire job were completed. ie: are 2-3 days the usual ammount of time a complete backup can take?
my version: w7 7100 64bit

I take it the 1gig external is a typo.

Using a backup program for user files like photo's, music and such, is not only unnecessary, but also dangerous.

Unnecessary because you can just copy the files to another location, so you'll have duplicates.

Dangerous because when a backup image becomes unreadable, you lose everything in it.

Backups are useful only to backup OS drive.

Try the free trial of "Acronis True Image Home 2009".
It's brilliant and easy to learn.
It can also backup networked PC's but I only recommend it with a gigabit network.

You can try it out before buying it. ($ 49,99)

greetz

 

[pparks1]

well for me its all about saving data - i have lots of photos, images and music files. thats why i figured it would make sense to let win7 backup the entire pc.
markus

As long as you have these files all organized in a certain location, it's really easy to use something like robocopy to back them up.

Just write a quick batch file that looks like this

C:\Windows\system32\robocopy C:\users\me\Pictures E:\Backups\Pictures /MIR /E 
C:\Windows\system32\robocopy C:\users\me\Downloads E:\Backups\Downloads /MIR /E 
C:\Windows\system32\robocopy C:\users\me\Music E:\Backups\Music /MIR /E

So, in the above example, I am backup up 3 locations on my C drive and sending them to an external USB 2.0 hard drive which is mounted as the E drive. The job only processes the files which have changed since the last run, so it's extremely fast.

The /MIR says to mirror the data. Meaning that if you delete it from the hard drive on your computer, it's going to also delete it from the E drive in the case of my example.

The /E says to copy subdirectories, including empty ones. This way you can preserve the file structure that you have in place.

 

[TGSoldier]

Just adding a little more detail on the .bat file.

In case you don't have robocopy.exe, I uploaded the .exe here

2shared - download robocopy.exe

I use the following .bat file

@echo off

robocopy "C:\users\tom\desktop" "F:\desktop" /mir /s

echo Backup Complete

pause

 

[149047]

thanks guys!! i think i learnt something today. you're absolutely right about the dangers of backing up photos and music files other than by mirroring them to another drive.
the robocopy thing is really very handy. thank you everyone for your splendid ideas
markus

 

[z3r010]

I use Microsofts synctoy for backing up my pics & docs - http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/...36-98E0-4EE9-A7C5-98D0592D8C52&displaylang=en

I also let WHS do nightly backups

 

[ultraplanet]

I was doing a little search to find out about this duration thing...

I backed up my usual 68'ish gigs of data to my external firewire drive that I did on my machine when it was running XP. What used to take a little over 2 hours took Window 7 RTM over 7 and a half hours. The size of the backup is still around 68 gigs so I am not picking up any extra stuff except time. WOW.

I will be looking into some of the other solutions mentioned here! Thanks.

 

[ultraplanet]

Turns out robocopy is actually part of Windows 7. No need to download.

Something interesting... the latest version of iTunes actually uses junction points in the Documents folder and robocopy copies junction points by default. So you end up with 2 copies of your iTunes music unless you switch it off.

/XJ :: eXclude Junction points. (normally included by default).

 

[149047]

hi everyone!
just for curiosity: windows sync toy & robocopy are to be run manually to do their job, or is there an automated function taking care of the desired tasks anytime something changes ?
regards,
markus

http://www.humanchaos.net

 

[z3r010]

Sync toy can be added as a scheduled task, just click the help button in program for full instructions, as for robocopy I've never used it.

 

[pparks1]

Turns out robocopy is actually part of Windows 7. No need to download.

Yeah, they started including it with Vista. It's a nice little tool.