Backup Speeds

[Admiral208]

I used to do a full backup every night but that was starting to take too long to complete and I found it was still running in the morning when I came into work. Ive now changed to a full backup on a Friday night and differential backups during the week.

 

We use backup exec 12.5 and the job rate of the full backup is about 1gb/min. The backup rate for the differential backup is only 200mb/min. Is this normal for differential backups to be slower?

 

Thanks

James

[3s-gtech]

I found my backups were still running in the mornings. Using robocopy, I used the /XD switch to not copy AppData across (students and staff have redirected AppData in their home folders). Since then, backup times have halved, as there are so many files in each profile.

 

I'd guess differential backups would be much slower, as it has to analyse the existing files first rather than just blaze through.

[Bruce123]

I used to do a full backup every night but that was starting to take too long to complete and I found it was still running in the morning when I came into work. Ive now changed to a full backup on a Friday night and differential backups during the week.

 

We use backup exec 12.5 and the job rate of the full backup is about 1gb/min. The backup rate for the differential backup is only 200mb/min. Is this normal for differential backups to be slower?

 

Thanks

James

 

I'd guess differential backups would be much slower, as it has to analyse the existing files first rather than just blaze through.

 

It could also be because that the files that change more frequently tend to be smaller files (e.g. shortcuts) and smaller files tend to take longer (per MB of transfer) to backup due to their fragmentation.

 

I remember when we were using BExec 9 (a very old version!) and the transfer rates weren't great. But I think there's always going to be a problem with transfer rates when backing up at the file level, rather than block transfer using Volume Shadow Copy.

[Edu-IT]

Ive now changed to a full backup on a Friday night

What do you backup to, is it offsite? Do you collect the full backup on a Saturday?