is 8 hours for 96GB archive normal?

Discussion in 'Paragon Drive Backup Product Line' started by IanS, Jan 21, 2011.

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  1. IanS

    IanS Registered Member

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    Hello all:

    I just downloaded Paragon Backup & Recovery Home Free last night for the first time. I have a 640GB system drive that I want to image. I put a brand new 1 TB drive in an external enclosure and connected it by eSATA. I partitioned the new drive using Paragon, and started an archive creation.

    So far, in 8 hours it has done 96GB of the archive, and claims another 16 hours to go. Is that normal? Would it really take 3 days to do a 2TB drive?

    I once used EASEUS Partition Manager to do a disk copy of the 640GB disk over eSATA, and it took about 2 1/2 hours.

    Finally, I assume I will need a boot CD after my archive is built, just in case of system drive failure. How/where do I get the ISO from to create the boot CD?

    Thanks a lot for helping a newb.
     
  2. DVD+R

    DVD+R Registered Member

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    The time it takes is going to be very dependant on what type of backup your doing (full, incremental ...) how much data, what the files are like (lots of small files, fewer big files), how fast the actual disks can do a sustained transfer. What else is happening.

    Generally small files mean the backup takes longer. For the plain backup I'd probably expect something around 6 hours, If you're verifying as well that's probably the same time again. If there's something like a scheduled virus scan overnight then that could slow it down considerably.
     
  3. IanS

    IanS Registered Member

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    Thanks for the info.

    There is no other activity on the machine. I killed all the unnecessary processes and services before starting. Decent 7200 rpm 3.5" disks. About 300 GB of data - lots of 3MB music files and lots of software installations. Disk has just been defragmented. No errors - CHKDSK has been run. I'm doing a full disk image for the first time.

    No virus scan, but Avira was still running. Would shutting it down make a difference?

    24 hours is not really going to work for me going forward. Any way to speed it up?

    Thanks a lot.
     
  4. DVD+R

    DVD+R Registered Member

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    It depends, What system specifications do you have? for instance if you have i3 or i5 then its going to take longer than with an i7, in short, the faster the processor the faster the back-up. i do all my back-up's with Acronis True Image Home, and acomplete back-up is accomplished in about 10 minutes, in due respect I'm only bacing up 21.8 GB and I do have an i7 Q740 processor on my Notebook running at 1.73GHz
     
  5. IanS

    IanS Registered Member

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    I think I found the source of my problem. I ran HDTUNE and it seems I am getting a measly 3.8 MBPS throughput over eSATA to my destination drive.

    It was working fine last October. I cannot figure out what has changed to make it run so slowly. My source drive gives me a steady 110MBPS.
     
  6. IanS

    IanS Registered Member

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    More info in case this happens to anyone else in the future.

    I am running XP. My backup drive is a WD Caviar Green. Turns out those are considered an 'Advanced Format Drive' which doesn't play well with XP:
    http://www.anandtech.com/show/2888/2

    Turns out that WD makes software available to align the drive properly with XP:
    http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=608&lang=en

    Once properly aligned, I continued to use the 'Acronis True Image WD Edition' to do my imaging, upped my throughput to 80 MBps and finished the image from the 640 GB disk (~300GB used) in under 2 hours!
     
  7. DVD+R

    DVD+R Registered Member

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    Glad to see you fixed your problem Ian
     
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