Basic backup questions: Why so slow? Is there an incremental option? Can I pause?

WD Legacy Products Sentinel Products
1

Trying to backup from a laptop. Total size of the folders I’ve chosen is about 250 gigs.

I’ve already done a backup once and now I’d like to do an incremental update.

Is there an option to do this? 

Also, the backup is taking forever (3 hours and I’m at about 10%).

If it’s going to take over 24 hours to backup, can I pause the process and restart later? (I need to take the laptop home at the end of the day.)

Thanks!

2

The client backup automatically switches to incremental after the first full backup. I’ve got an 8TB Sentinel backing up 20 clients in a small office, backup times range anywhere from 10-25 minutes per workstation depending on the change rate of the data.

Initial backups are never going to be that fast due to the rather poor performance of RAID5 on the Intel ICH10R chipset. On the plus side it keeps user slowdown to a minimum! :smiley:

3

Thanks, G! So I’m 6 hours into my backup, about to go home, and I’m only at 13%. We have a small office with fast internet but this is driving me crazy.

So, how do I pause the backup when I need to shut down? Or will it restart if I keep the program open and don’t shut down my laptop until I return tomorrow? (Even then, I’m not going to finish the backup for a long time at this rate!)

4

It seems that you used the backup utility built within WIndows 7 and not the Connector Software that comes with WD Sentinel DX4000. 

As GHoward mentioned … When using  the Connector Software on your Windows machine, “The client backup automatically switches to incremental after the first full backup.”

By default the backups are full/bare-metal backup and every subequent backup is much faster since it only copies over incremental “blocks”. Thanks to Block level deduplication, built into the backup technology that WD Sentinel provides via Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials OS.

Quite often the bottleneck can be the networking equipment, which might be dated:

  • I tend to avoid  having a laptop on Wi-fi, at least for the first backup.
  • If your router is somewhat old i.e. 802.11g, that can contribute to a lower throughput
  • Similarly the LAN connectivity, whether your router/switch provdies Gigabit connectivity or not.

Hope this helps!

5

Agree the first back should be done on a wired connection if posible, after taht they will go quick(er) :slight_smile:

There is no pause