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bbarry
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 Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2018 8:42 pm |
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Joined: Fri Nov 30, 2012 12:47 am
Posts: 2408
Location: North Central Arkansas
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I use Macrium Reflect - Home Edition to create a system image to three different USB 3.0 external hard drives. On two of these drives I create a image only of my primary C: drive, and these backups go reasonably fast (~45 min for 405 GB as best I recall).
On the 3rd drive, I create an image of my C: drive as well as an image of yet another external drive L: that contains only data folders and files (500 GB of my animal photos and videos). So this backup to the 3rd external drive is approximately 900 GB and it is taking about 8 hours.
Since my drive L: contains only folders and files (166 folders and 67,653 files to be exact), I am now wondering if a system image is the best way to back up this drive. Should I be using a "file & folder Macrium backup", which I have never done before?
Thanks in advance......
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jaylach
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Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2018 9:10 pm |
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| Resident Geekazoid Administrator |
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Joined: Wed Mar 21, 2012 5:09 am
Posts: 9460
Location: The state of confusion; I just use Wyoming for mail.
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Personally, on the data, L:, drive, I would just do a drag and drop. In fact I do this exact thing on my NAS drive connected to my router. I do C: images on a schedule but just do a drag and drop to a specific partition on the NAS drive for my 211 GB of data.
To be honest you don't even need to partition on the external to drag and drop. You can just create a folder named 'Data' or whatever you wish.
My guess as to the extreme time involved when including the L: drive is that, both, the source and destination are externals. When seeing ~45 minutes on just the C: drive it must be remembered that it is an internal drive hence the read time is MUCH faster than the external L: drive.
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bbarry
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Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2018 10:19 pm |
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Joined: Fri Nov 30, 2012 12:47 am
Posts: 2408
Location: North Central Arkansas
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jaylach wrote: Personally, on the data, L:, drive, I would just do a drag and drop. In fact I do this exact thing on my NAS drive connected to my router. I do C: images on a schedule but just do a drag and drop to a specific partition on the NAS drive for my 211 GB of data.
To be honest you don't even need to partition on the external to drag and drop. You can just create a folder named 'Data' or whatever you wish.
The external is already partitioned. So are you saying I can drag and drop the entire L: drive to a partition on that drive? I don't have to drag folder at a time off of L: do I?
My guess as to the extreme time involved when including the L: drive is that, both, the source and destination are externals. When seeing ~45 minutes on just the C: drive it must be remembered that it is an internal drive hence the read time is MUCH faster than the external L: drive.
That's probably an excellent guess....I never thought about that.
Thanks, Jay.
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jaylach
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Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2018 10:35 pm |
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Joined: Wed Mar 21, 2012 5:09 am
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Location: The state of confusion; I just use Wyoming for mail.
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Not positive if you can just drag the drive icon or not, possibly. If not just hold down the left mouse button and swipe the mouse pointer across everything on the drive and it will highlight everything. Then just drag.
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bbarry
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Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2018 10:55 pm |
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Joined: Fri Nov 30, 2012 12:47 am
Posts: 2408
Location: North Central Arkansas
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jaylach wrote: Not positive if you can just drag the drive icon or not, possibly. If not just hold down the left mouse button and swipe the mouse pointer across everything on the drive and it will highlight everything. Then just drag. I'll try both ways tomorrow. I will also modify my Macrium backup scheme to just back up my C: drive. And then I'll make a new folder for the drag and drop of L: drive. I was wrong about that external drive being partitioned....it's not. I just use folders, so it will be easy to make another folder for the contents of my L: drive. Thanks again, Jay. I'll keep you posted on my progress.
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Peter2150
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Posted: Fri Mar 30, 2018 12:01 am |
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Joined: Sun Apr 15, 2012 5:52 pm
Posts: 970
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Hi BB
I agree with Jay, imaging data drives is way time consuming. What I consider critical data I keep both off site and on the other computer.
My only concern was should ransomware dare to get on my system the other internal drives are vulnerable. Solved that problem with a little gem called Pumpernickel.
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bbarry
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Posted: Fri Mar 30, 2018 7:41 am |
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Joined: Fri Nov 30, 2012 12:47 am
Posts: 2408
Location: North Central Arkansas
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Peter2150 wrote: Hi BB
I agree with Jay, imaging data drives is way time consuming. What I consider critical data I keep both off site and on the other computer.
Pete, thanks for your response, but I guess I don't understand. Are you suggesting that I just copy these files to another computer as a backup? Second question - would the "file & copy" feature of Macrium be faster than creating an image?
In my case, the number of files on this drive increases almost daily, as I take more and more pics. I currently have 67, 653 files consuming 500 GB on the drive.
Although I also use File History and SyncToy to back up these files, I also want to back up the entire data drive on a weekly basis. I have been using Macrium to create an image of the drive, but as you noted this has become very time consuming. So how do you suggest I go about backing up this data drive?
My only concern was should ransomware dare to get on my system the other internal drives are vulnerable. Solved that problem with a little gem called Pumpernickel.
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Peter2150
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Posted: Fri Mar 30, 2018 10:58 am |
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Joined: Sun Apr 15, 2012 5:52 pm
Posts: 970
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Your already doing it. Sync to a 2nd drive that you don't keep online.
Imaging will be a much slower solution to the problem and you don't need it.
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bbarry
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Posted: Fri Mar 30, 2018 9:03 pm |
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Joined: Fri Nov 30, 2012 12:47 am
Posts: 2408
Location: North Central Arkansas
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I went to the Macrium Support Forum and they showed me how to read the logs for elapsed time, new file size, etc. for each of my disk image backups. In studying some of these log events, I noticed that something strange and unexplained happened last April that really slowed down my transfer rate. To illustrate:
On 4/12/17:
Time - 01:25:29 New File - 581 GB
On 4/19/17:
Time - 01:38:29 New File - 585 GB
And then something happened to cause all subsequent backups to be very slow, i.e.
On 4/26/17::
Time - 07:55:00 New File - 590 GB
And on 5/3/17:
Time - 08:25:35 New File - 593 GB
And then finally the last backup on 3/28/18
Time - 09:18:02 New File - 794 GB
The external drive that I'm backing up to has remained the same from the beginning, as has the USB port and cable that I use. I made no hardware changes to my system. The only software changes that I can remember are Windows 10 Pro updates. I wonder if there was a Windows update in mid-April that would affect my transfer rates? Any reason you can think of that would cause this drastic slowdown starting almost a year ago?
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jaylach
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Posted: Fri Mar 30, 2018 9:23 pm |
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Joined: Wed Mar 21, 2012 5:09 am
Posts: 9460
Location: The state of confusion; I just use Wyoming for mail.
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I really don't know but is it possible that you switched the external drive from a USB3 port to a USB2 port?
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bbarry
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Posted: Fri Mar 30, 2018 10:39 pm |
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Joined: Fri Nov 30, 2012 12:47 am
Posts: 2408
Location: North Central Arkansas
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jaylach wrote: I really don't know but is it possible that you switched the external drive from a USB3 port to a USB2 port? Jay, I don't recall doing that at all. And to do so would require getting down on my knees to reach behind the tower. I can still get down, but getting back up without help is really tough. I just downloaded a utility called CrystalDiskMark that is suppose to benchmark your drives. I'm still trying to figure out how to use the program, as the documentation is skimpy. That will be a project for tomorrow. I still think Windows update did something to cause this issue, perhaps changing my driver.
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