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Network backup from NAS much slower than normal transfer rates

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Hi,

I'm trying to create a backup FROM my NAS to an external USB hard disk, using Acronis TrueImage Home 2011.

I have the following setup:
Synology 411+ connected to Gigabit router
PC with TrueImage Home 2011 installed
USB3 external HDD connected to PC

Average transfer speed during the backup is about 9 MB/s.
The Windows Network utilisation monitor graph is all over the place, but never exceeds a utilisation of 25% as occasional spikes, average utilisation seems much lower.
The network speed throttle setting is not activated in Acronis, compression is set to normal and backup task priority is set to high.

When performing a straight directory copy (lots of small files) from the NAS to the USB3 HDD via the PC I get transfer speeds closs to 100 MB/s.

Can anyone explain why the transfer speed is so much slower than a straight directory copy and what I can do to improve performance?

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A lot of small files can be different from a big file. Make sure you compare apples to apples.

The first thing to do is to backup to various places to see if this is a problem with ATI, or with drivers, any combination of the following:
- backup to internal disk, compare with a Windows copy of the backup file back to the disk to compare,
- backup to external USB disk (if possible without a hub, USB 2.0 port), compare,
- backup to USB 3.0, compare,
- backup to windows share over network.

ATI is actually pretty good with network efficiency, from my experience, but I don't use Synology and I know there has been problems with certain products.

You can also tweak network performance by enabling/disabling advanced network settings, in particular IPv4 chksum offload and such.

You can consider using the FTP protocol (optimized for file transfer) over the SMB protocol (standard windows shares are general purpose).

Hi Pat,
thanks for your response.
I believe I am comparing apples with apples, as the directory transfer speeds measured are using the same setup (from NAS to USB3 disk via computer). I made the point of a directory copy with small files, because if anything the transfer speeds in this setting would be slower than for a smaller number of large files, ie transfer speed in the "worst case" scenario of a direct, non Arconis backup copy, is around 100MB/s, or around 10 times faster than the Acronis backup using the same setup.