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What could be this hangup causing this backup to be so slow?

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Today I was helping a friend of a friend set up a couple backups using ATI2018. One backup task is a full disk/partition backup of C:, the other is a Files and Folders incremental backup of some data. The backups were to a USB 3.0 external drive. System is Windows 10, on a four year PC with an i5.

I did things similar to what I do on my system, which operates very quickly. (SSDs help!).

So her full drive backup took about 23 minutes to create a 66GB backup file. When running the Files and Folders backup, we found the rate at which data was written was far slower. It was so slow and part way through moving at a crawl, so we ended up redoing to limit the total size of the files to about 20GB. It took longer to do those 20GB than to do the full system 66GB.

I looked through the Task Manager to see about getting rid of some activity, and we killed off Malwarebytes which seemed to be sucking up resources. But I also looked at the performance tab and found the C: drive was running at 100%, while the backup destination drive looked normal.

Immediately after completing the initial Files and Folders backup, I ran it again to create an incremental.  Oddly, that incremental took 6 1/2 minutes, to report that it backed up 0 bytes, although the incremental .tib file was about 11KB.

Just wondering if there is something else I should have been looking at to see about getting this to run faster... or is that just as fast as it could possibly be.

Thanks.

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Full disk backups are always faster the file/folder backups.  When a full disk backup is run the application copies data at the block level whereas when backup is of file/folder the application copies at the bit level.  This causes latency for file/folder backups.

Another factor is that of data type.  If the files/folders being backed up contain already compressed data this can cause the operation to be slower.  

Lastly, if the data being backed up consists of primarily small size files the backup operation gets slower.  This is normal behavior and is to be expected.  Drive makers continue to develop controllers that are optimized for small file size but still small file size is a problem in the read/write performance area.