Disk backups

[Slay]

Could someone tell me why a backup of a HDD takes hours and hours ? I am backing up my HDD with 30 or so GB used on a 150GB HDD and backing it up to DVD, my DVD writes @48x and my HDD is supposed to be @ 150MB/s @10,000 RPM's. :confused: :banghead:

[Caged Anger]

Well first off lets get some extra details:

Is it external?
If so, is it firewire, USB, eSATA?
What program are you using to do the backup?
Is this your first backup?
If not, are you doing a complete backup again or an incremental backup?
(Difference is a whole lot of time, incremental only backs up things that have changed since the original backup)

[Slay]

Well first off lets get some extra details:

Is it external?
If so, is it firewire, USB, eSATA?
What program are you using to do the backup?
Is this your first backup?
If not, are you doing a complete backup again or an incremental backup?
(Difference is a whole lot of time, incremental only backs up things that have changed since the original backup)
Not external, macrium reflect= program, 1st backup yes, complete.
I still don't see why it takes this long.

[Caged Anger]

well, its copying every file you selected to backup plus its compressing it at the same time. I know the first backup I did on this system took around 4 hrs total

[Death Engineer]

Your hard drive isn't likely 150GB/s unless it's some kind of special prototype. ;) SATA drives are typically 150MB/s or 3.0GB/s. Note that those numbers are just theoretical throughput maximums. Even most 3.0GB/s drives do not approach 150MB/s throughput in the real world. On average, it is closer to 75-85MB/s. See the latest HD article (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/500gb-hdd-disk,2150-9.html) at Toms Hardware as they have benchmarked recent 500GB drives. Like others have said, this doesn't include any compression.

[Slay]

Yeah, I just edited that, I meant MB not GB I have been backing up since yesterday and still going, on disk #5 I bought Fallout 3 and am ready to kick A$$ :D

[Slay]

I gave up on the backup, was on disk #9 and at 46% + 3 Days !!
Just not that important to me, I can reformat and load windows and software quicker than that.

Thanks for the input guys.

[Death Engineer]

Just get a backup drive and copy the files. Incremental is nice depending on how often you're going to do it and depending on the size of the data set. But going without a backup... That doesn't really seem like a reasonable option. Maybe just change the data set to something smaller (just the bare necessities you would need if the HD pooped out).

[ME BIGGD01]

I have been using Acronis which I find to be excellent. It is fast and very reasonable in price for what it does. They have Home version which I was lucky to get for free from testing their Beta version. It puts Ghost to shame.

[Grimmy]

I have been using Acronis which I find to be excellent. It is fast and very reasonable in price for what it does. They have Home version which I was lucky to get for free from testing their Beta version. It puts Ghost to shame.

I just downloaded the trial version of Acronis, and so far I love it. Having so many rigs these days, figured it would save me lots of time if I lose a HD or need to reformat and stuff.

[ME BIGGD01]

I just downloaded the trial version of Acronis, and so far I love it. Having so many rigs these days, figured it would save me lots of time if I lose a HD or need to reformat and stuff.


That's the way to do it. Make an image for each system and store it all on a removeable hard drive. At any given time you can restore your OS like new. Or if you have a system that acts like a file server you can do it through the network and boot off the cd to pull image. Defiently a good piece of software.

[Slay]

I just used Power Backup that came with my video card and it backed everything up in 1:10. Compared to the hours on the other :mad: I guess it was pure junk.