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How do you do fast backups please ?

C

-Chris-

Member
I have two external 1TB usb3 hard drives (WD Passports) and I wanted to back up 900GB from one onto the other (empty) one. The laptop is a Dell 6440, and am using the usb3 ports on it for both hard drives plugged in at the same time, and the laptop has 8GB Ram, BUT, I highlighted all the files and folders in the source disk, r/clicked, then clicked on send to, and chose the destination drive, and it's saying about 23 hours remaining and it's doing 3.64 MB/second?? Has anyone any ideas where it's going wrong please? What do the people here use to do fast backups like this please?
 
USB is slow. Your best bet is using one of those drive docks that has esata.

Also it sounds like you're just using the GUI. That too is going to be slow.

Best bet is using something like rsync. The first backup will take a longer time but then the rest will only copy files that changed.
 
My Passports are 2.5'' drives, so even in best case conditions, they won't be saturating USB 3.0 speeds.

What sort of data is in this 900GB? Is it lots of small files? That means lots of small/random reads and will torpedo the average transfer rate. Also, it sounds like the source drive is almost full, depending HDD performance can slow down dramatically as the drive fills up.

To troubleshoot, you might try grabbing 10-20ish GB of files, turning them into a compressed archive with 7zip (or WinRAR, or whatever) and transferring the archive. This will test your performance in sequential read/write of a large file. If that is pretty snappy, the issue is likely random/read performance from lots of small files. If that's still pretty slow, the issue might be the almost full HDD on the source Passport.
 
You're still looking at several hours to transfer that much data though, no matter what you do.

Until the copy has been running a while, it's not going to give you a good idea how fast it's going.

The fastest way would be to use a block level or raw data cloning utility like linux 'dd' or CloneZilla. There's something called "dd for windows" which I've never used, but which was recommended on some Raspberry Pi site for image cloning to SD cards.
 
Many thanks for the ideas on it, just wondering, are there are any tweaks that I can do to the laptop and/or the external hard drives to make the process faster?
 
Modern external HDDs start at about 120MB/s and slow down to about half by the end of the disk. So to play it safe your average is 70MB/s. That's about 3.5 hours for 900GB... best case scenario meaning you are transferring large p0rn video files.

One thing you can do is ensure that each external HDD is not using the same USB hub. Go to the 'Device Manager' and under 'View' choose 'Devices by Connection.' Now plug both HDDs into USB ports and you'll have to hunt each one down. Just be sure that they are not on the same USB hub. You'll know since they'll be sharing the USB hub tree. I have seen on some small screen laptops that you only have one USB hub.

I assume the HDD isn't an OS and just contains data. I also assume that both hard drives are formatted the same. Either both NTFS or exFAT or FAT32. If the new one is FAT32, you cannot copy files larger than 4GB onto it.

Next thing to do is if are not using Windows 8 to copy the files, then use teracopy. Teracopy will attempt to copy in bulk and you can stop and resume the transfer if you are not comfortable with letting it copy overnight.

And yes, using disk cloning or partition software will get you the fastest speed, but they are far more involved. Best of luck.
 
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Many thanks for the ideas on it, just wondering, are there are any tweaks that I can do to the laptop and/or the external hard drives to make the process faster?
Click to expand...

Other than razel's suggestions, and dave's of trying block-level transfers, I don't think there is much else you can do.

You could make future back-ups much faster by using utilities like
"syncback", Terabyte' Image for Windows/Linux, or Acronis to back-up essentially just the changes.
 
razel said:
Modern external HDDs start at about 120MB/s and slow down to about half by the end of the disk. So to play it safe your average is 70MB/s. That's about 3.5 hours for 900GB... best case scenario meaning you are transferring large p0rn video files.

One thing you can do is ensure that each external HDD is not using the same USB hub. Go to the 'Device Manager' and under 'View' choose 'Devices by Connection.' Now plug both HDDs into USB ports and you'll have to hunt each one down. Just be sure that they are not on the same USB hub. You'll know since they'll be sharing the USB hub tree. I have seen on some small screen laptops that you only have one USB hub.

I assume the HDD isn't an OS and just contains data. I also assume that both hard drives are formatted the same. Either both NTFS or exFAT or FAT32. If the new one is FAT32, you cannot copy files larger than 4GB onto it.

Next thing to do is if are not using Windows 8 to copy the files, then use teracopy. Teracopy will attempt to copy in bulk and you can stop and resume the transfer if you are not comfortable with letting it copy overnight.

And yes, using disk cloning or partition software will get you the fastest speed, but they are far more involved. Best of luck.
Click to expand...
Thanks for that detailed reply, it's much appreciated. Will check our the hub thing, and if it helps for any more answers in the meantime, there's no os on either external hard drive, both are on NTFS and the os on the laptop is Windows 7
 
Also, maybe try creating a "temp file copy" folder on your laptop's internal hard drive, and see if you can get a different copy speed when you connect only the one source USB drive, and copy to the hard drive.
 
razel said:
Modern external HDDs start at about 120MB/s and slow down to about half by the end of the disk. So to play it safe your average is 70MB/s. That's about 3.5 hours for 900GB... best case scenario meaning you are transferring large p0rn video files.

One thing you can do is ensure that each external HDD is not using the same USB hub. Go to the 'Device Manager' and under 'View' choose 'Devices by Connection.' Now plug both HDDs into USB ports and you'll have to hunt each one down. Just be sure that they are not on the same USB hub. You'll know since they'll be sharing the USB hub tree. I have seen on some small screen laptops that you only have one USB hub.

I assume the HDD isn't an OS and just contains data. I also assume that both hard drives are formatted the same. Either both NTFS or exFAT or FAT32. If the new one is FAT32, you cannot copy files larger than 4GB onto it.

Next thing to do is if are not using Windows 8 to copy the files, then use teracopy. Teracopy will attempt to copy in bulk and you can stop and resume the transfer if you are not comfortable with letting it copy overnight.

And yes, using disk cloning or partition software will get you the fastest speed, but they are far more involved. Best of luck.
Click to expand...
Thanks for this have enabled write caching on both hard drives, but when looking at devices by connection, where to from there? Have just tried copy and paste again (large and small files and folders, (no p0rn!))and after its doing that for two hours, it says 5MB/second??? I know I could try teracopy, but surely it should be doing more than 5MB/second without any other programme??
 
3MBps seems a bit slow, even going from one USB3 to another USB3 port. It sounds like you may be transferring a lot of small files. It's much slower to copy a bunch of small files than it is to copy fewer large files.

So what might work better is cloning the drive with something like Reflect Free.
 
USB 3.0 is fine. I regularly get 100+MBps (to a 2.5" SSD 🙂). But, you are backing up to HDDs, and usually very slow ones, often with slow controllers running custom UMS firmware (rather than exposing it as a SATA bridge, like a dock does).

Backing up desktops at work, the 100Mb network isn't the bottleneck, with most users on 3.5" 7200 RPM HDDs. A local backup takes maybe 80% the time of going over the LAN.

So, as a reality check, copy a single multi-GB ISO, and time it. That should get 50MBps average or higher, even on slow drives with no write caching, and edge up towards 100MBps on a typical 2.5" drive with write caching. If large files go OK, then a file-based backup will just plain be slow, and you might want to look at imaging, or a sync-type file backup (that only copies changed files). Even on the same hub, it seems like files of decent size should go quicker than 5MBps, unless they're mostly small files.
 
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USB 3.0 devices are fairly rare though, it's probably safe to assume we're talking USB 2.0.

I missed the part about going USB to USB. If that is the case, depending on how the ports are wired internally and if they are a separate bus or just a hub, the bandwidth could be cut in half going from one to the other.
 
Still sounds like one of them (or a cable) is USB 2.

Better hope that's it, because if it's not, there's something seriously wrong with either your Lappy486 or one of the HDDs.
 
Probably a long shot and I don't even know if it applies to this laptop but -

Have you checked the bios to make sure the USB ports are set as USB3 and not USB2 (legacy only)?

Any chance the USB driver is set as USB2 and not USB3 (SuperSpeed)?
 
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