Windows Backup - Extremely Slow

[andy7]

Windows backup took 4 days for first backup of 213GB data from internal RAID 0 data drive to FW 800-connected external drive. Running ASUS P6T Deluxe, i7-950 w/12GB. All drivers 100% current per ASUS site and everything else runs great (except system restore which is also dog-slow, no offense to canines).

Lots of these files are AVI's and MP3's. Some AVIs are pretty big, but a full backup like this took 3-4 hours on XP. File copy is also very slow on Windows 7.

Is this a general problem? Have others found a fix?

 

[zigzag3143]

Windows backup took 4 days for first backup of 213GB data from internal RAID 0 data drive to FW 800-connected external drive. Running ASUS P6T Deluxe, i7-950 w/12GB. All drivers 100% current per ASUS site and everything else runs great (except system restore which is also dog-slow, no offense to canines).

Lots of these files are AVI's and MP3's. Some AVIs are pretty big, but a full backup like this took 3-4 hours on XP. File copy is also very slow on Windows 7.

Is this a general problem? Have others found a fix?

Andy

Hi and welcome to sevenforums

I dont have a fix for the built in utility but can offer an alternative. A third party app called acronis. It is more flexible (usefull for just backing up a single folder) and it is fast. My media backup is ~100 Gigs and it takes about 3 hours which I schedule overnight. My rig is only a dual core and the backup runs on a wired connection to a media server.

Something is wrong with the slow copy, slow backup. My gut feeling is the RAID. Either a setting is wrong or the driver needs to be re-installed. If you are not using homegroup you can also disable IPv6,

Can you tell us more about your network cinfig?

Can you type cmd in search>type ipconfig /all and upload screenshots for us to examine


Thanks in advance

Ken J

 

[andy7]

Write-caching policy

The target drive is FW800. Based on another post, I changed the Device Manager Policies tab Removal Policy to "Better Performance" and checked to enable write-caching. I unchecked "Turn off Windows write-cache buffer..."

To test, I ran an incremental backup with a good amount of new video and audio file data and the backup completed in 2-3 hours, very acceptable to me. The target disk activity seemed similar to what I was used to with XP Pro.

Others may want to try this. Thanks for the reply!

 

[carbonara]

Yeah, unfortunately the built in backup is still, even though it's been improved a lot, utterly cr*p. It's so slow it's practically unusable for anyone with more than 20GB of data and it's also untrustworthy. I ran a backup of my data plus a system image after installing windows 7, this came to 275GB which the backup util took about 12 hours to backup. I've now gone to do a differential backup (the only option I believe) and the backup util is acknowledging that there is 275GB of data on the target drive but is also saying I've never run a backup before.

So I've started running it anyway just to see if it's for some reason forgetting the date of the last backup but will run a differential anyway but it's not, checking the running status indicates that it's copying files that haven't been changed since the last backup to the target drive.

In other words, as usual with bundled MS apps, ditch it and use something that works.