What is Your Backup Speed

Roger,

Backup speed is very subjective.  Speed is highly dependent on what type of data you are backing up True Image uses a compression method so previously compressed data is much slower to backup than uncompressed data.  If your backup is a full disk backup then speed will be faster than if you are backing up files/folders.  Reason is that full disk backups are done at the block level whereas files and folders backups are done at the bit level taking more time.

An incremental backup will be faster than a differential will due to less data being backed up.  Backing up over a network poses its own challenges.  Backup from one computer to another is generally faster than to a network storage device for example.  A wired network connection is faster than wireless as one would expect.  

Given your specs your bottle neck will be the single WD Green drive.  These drives are slow by design as they are energy conscious.  The more RAM you have on the target computer the better as well and CPU plays a role there too.  I would not care to guess what your speed may be as it would be just that, a guess!

I can tell you that for myself I backup over a Gigabit network to a FreeNAS computer that has an i5 CPU, 16GB RAM, and 4, 3TB WD 7200 rpm Red drives in a ZFS file system pool (9TB after formatting).  Network transfer speed averages around 630 to 650 Mbps so a 100GB full disk backup transfer is completed in about 5 or 6 minutes.  

Thanks Enchantech,

I very much understand the subjective nature of backups. The computer that host the WD Green Drive is an i5 with 16 GB of RAM. It is not by any means considered a rocket in today's terms, but it is more than adequate.

I feel that something is not right someplace. I am posting two screen shots that may shed some light on the situation. The screenshot of the backup currently running. It is showing more data backed up now with three hours remaining that is contained in the drive.

I do backup a lot of images. Professional photography is part of my business. RAW Image files, depending on what camera I am using, are easily 90MB. Not very long ago they were 10MB. RAW files do not compress very well, and they are big. Photoshop files after editing might approach a gigabyte.  JPGs are already compressed and stripped of ninety percent of the original RAW image data.

The single WD 4TB Green is a stopgap until I figure out what I am going to do. I have a solid off-site backup via AT&T. I used an 8TB Western Digital My Book previously, for on-site, which was close to full when it threw a rod. It looks like my best option is about five of the WD 4TB drives in a file server or on my other two workstations. I like those drives because they are quiet and reliable. I am the only one in the office so the two i5s don't do much real work.

I will enter my system information after this post. This is the first time I have run backup on a Gigabyte network and I have not previously dealt with this much data.

Backup is set to backup complete drives. Data files are structured in drives around backup procedure and more importantly, ease and speed of restore. Worst case as far of backup restore, I can be up and running with about fifty to a hundred GB of data. Downloading 100GBs of data is not quick but nothing like months for everything else.

Thanks again for your help and information.

Hello Y'all

Here is a little more information.  Backup plans are being rearranged  to maximize redundancy on a 4TB network drive located in a PC.. It is temporary and not big enough.

Previous backups done over the network are being deleted after backing up corresponding data on a local internal drive.The source consist of one M2 with fifty gigs of data.  The second is a RAID 5 that is made up of four SSDs and contains 550 gigs of data.  True Image is attempting to back up the above mentioned data to a local RAID 5 that consist of four WD Black 2TB mechanical drives.

In my opinion, the current backup should run faster than a Haint which is the fastest thing in the South.  The screenshot of the backup was taken fifteen minutes after the backup started  It is going to take a while if it works.  True Image is not even tickling the processor as the second and third screenshot illustrate.  Current CPU usage is averaging about ten percent.

I am attempting to run a full backup with no compression while giving True Image maximum resources.  How do you make the big dog eat?

While writing this, I got a message telling me the disk is full and it is not.  The last two images will illustrate the message and space left on desk.  The source and target are not in the same partition or on the same drives.  Y'all will see another image of this problem.

I am not in any way bashing Acronis.  Problems such as mine come with the territory.  It may not be an Acronis problem.  I do need help solving it.

Y'all have a great week.

Roger

Here we go.  The images will better illustrate this situation better than I can describe.  Source is one M2 containing 50GB of data and a RAID 5 consisting four SSDs containing 550GB of data.

Both RAID 5s are controlled by the LSI RAID controller listed below.  Acronis was not the only thing running when the screenshots were taken.  Two browsers with a dozen tabs running while streaming music on Amazon Prime.  A little Stevie Ray Vaughn has got to help some.  

Power usage is slightly above  idle.  Coolant temperature is 32C which is 3C cooler than CPU temp.  My point is this thing is not breaking a sweat.  Any idea where the bottleneck can be found if it is a bottleneck?

The  currently running backing is going to meet a violent death.  A straight copy is in order.  A straight copy should get the job done and will give me an idea how fast things are really going.  The screenshots should give Y'all an idea of what is going on at close to a given point in time.

Y'all have a great week,

Roger

Roger,

Thanks for all the posts. screenshots and system info update.  These help a great deal.

Your screenshot ending in 147870 I see that the app is saying that 899.24GB of data is backing up, that's a lot of data.  The biggest slice of the pie is Other, 490GB according to the screenshot.  Is Other your photo files?  If yes how much of that are RAW files?

In this same screenshot it appears to me that you are backing up a RAID 5 array to another SSD RAID array?  There is going to be a good bit of overhead there if that is correct but I believe your system can handle that fine,  Can you post a screenshot of the Activity tab for that backup after completion?  Backing up from SSD to SSD should run at close to I/O speed of the board which should be 575MBps or so. what does the Activity tab show?  

EDIT:

Screenshot 147909 shows a warning that is seen when a user selects multiple drives in a computer and the destination is one of drives selected for backup.  Because both your raid arrays are running from the same controller, this may be the cause of this warning.  This would suggest that True Image is confused that you are backing up from a source to that same source as destination.  That would cause the bottleneck, as you put it, to exist.  

Do you see this warning in every backup task you have created?  If not do the tasks where you so not see this warning run faster than those where you do see the warning?  If yes then I would suggest this is at least part of the cause of your slow performance. 

I think if you improve your network destination with another raid array or something similar and run backups of your existing arrays to that target you will see much improved performance.