Backup times vary wildly
I have several backups that run on schedules:
- A full incremental that runs every night at midnight and "resets" every thirty days
- A cloud backup of my critical documents that runs every night
- A full backup that runs every night
- A full backup that runs on the first of every month
Backups #1 and #3 sometimes run much longer than they should. It seems to be random.
Daily Incremental Backup
Date | Backed Up (GB) | Speed (Mbps) | Elapsed time |
---|---|---|---|
2022-01-29 | 16.0 | 128.5 | 2:09 |
2022-01-30 | 16.1 | 123.7 | 2:05 |
2022-01-31 | 11.8 | 98.6 | 2:03 |
2022-02-01 | 15.7 | 107.5 | 4:59 |
2022-02-02 | 15.2 | 84.4 | 3:31 |
2022-02-03 | 13.3 | 111.4 | 1:60 |
You'd think that the backup speed would correlate with the elapsed time, but compare 2022-01-31 with 2022-02-01. I imagine that the time spent figuring out what to back up doesn't have anything to do with the speed, but what could be causing these huge swings? If everything runs the way it should, my backups are done by the time I've had my coffee and hit the keyboard; but if my backups are still running at noon, I've got a big problem.
I've tried looking for other activity that might interfere, but so far I haven't found anything.
All suggestions are welcome.

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Thanks.
Unfortunately, I can't reproduce the problem at will. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't. The disk drives aren't at fault. I do three backups overnight: an incremental to an external USB drive, a cloud backup of "important" files, and a full backup to another USB drive.
The cloud backup takes between five and ten minutes. The full backup takes three hours, give or take a few minutes. That's consistent.
It's the incremental backup that fluctuates wildly:
Date | Backed up (GB) | Speed (Mbps) | Time | |
---|---|---|---|---|
March 19 | 15.8 | 122.0 | 02:13 | |
March 20 | 11.7 | 103.2 | 02:17 | |
March 21 | 10.5 | 83.6 | 05:18 | |
March 22 | 21.1 | 159.0 | 02:34 |
I understand there's a lot of work involved in figuring out what to include in an incremental backup, but the numbers for March 21 are out of whack.
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