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How long to backup 300Gig?

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I have something over 300gig to backup. Both the source and target are large, fast disks, directly connected via sat to the month board. The CPU is 4 core and there is 4 gig of memory.

It seems to be taking a couple of days to run.

What have other people found for data of this size?

Are there alternative strategies?

Thanks

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Greg,

To backup 68GB from an SSD to a local eSata disk on an overclocked computer it takes me about 9mn for a full backup, highest priority, normal compression.
Some strategies:
A- Create a separate partition for the system and apps in one, and for the user content in the other. Backup the system with ATI disk and partition, backup smaller changing files (ie Quicken file) with a file backup. Backup big compressed files that don't change (MP4, AVI, DIVX, VOB, MP3, JPG, AAC, etc.) with the sync function of ATI 2012 or a third party sync/mirror/backup piece of software that doesn't put files in a container.
B- Create a disk and partition backup, but exclude all your user content (ie C:\users). Backup the excluded content with the above method. Warning: if you restore your system partition, all your content will be erased during restoration and NOT restored (since it is not in the backup). So make sure you backup your content separately.

It's probably not mem that's an issue but how one or both drives is being handled. Are we talking esata? Are both external drives? It sounds like we're talking two internal drives.

You should never run longer than about 1 minute per gb to backup a disk or partition--usually much faster. For some reason file backups can take much longer.

If your partition/disk backups are taking more than about 1 gb per minute then there's a problem worth tracing.

Note that the time estimate will be way way off when it starts and be more accurate as the backup progresses.

Also, are these backups initiated from within windows or form the bootCD?

I was able to do 300GB to an overloaded system over a Gigabit connection in 14 hours with a disc backup. I assume that the 1GB/min rule does not apply to networks, but I have always found Acronis to be extremely slow (especially when compared to Windows' built-in backup).

From a 30 year veteran of system engineering (including disaster recovery), the rule is that you should NEVER back up to discs on the same system (as suggested earlier).

No. It didn't apply to networks. With networks, anything is possible. They can provide terribly fast speeds while, otoh, they can be set up to limit speed or intentially throttle large file transactions. Also, while the literal transfer sppeds might be fast, the neogiations between machines can add a tremendous amount of time.

One other question, are these two separate harddisks or two logical disk on one hard disk?

It took me about 2 1/2 hours to back up about 250 GB to an external USB drive, so it looks like about 100 GB per hour.