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FYI: A comparison of Disk vs File backups

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Today I got my new external drive for doing some offsite backups. My first backup was for my D: drive which is all data.

I created a File and Folders task to backup everything on the drive except for 5 folders. Here are the timing results from that backup task:

          File size: 183,853,704 KB
          Backed up: 202.5 GB
          Speed: 499.5 Mbps
          Time spent: 51 minutes, 2 seconds
          Data to recover: 202.5 GB
          Validation time: 32 minutes

I then created a Disk level backup for the same data with these results:

          File size: 183,865,711 KB
          Backed up: 203.4 GB
          Speed: 898.4 Mbps
          Time spent:29 minutes, 7 seconds
          Data to recover: 202.5 GB
          Validation time: 26 minutes

In both cases, the system was nearly idle.

I find this difference significant.

 

 

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The difference is that a disk level backup is performed at the block level whereas the file folder backup is performed at the bit level.  Block processing is much faster as you have found.