Windows Backup taking 20 hrs so far

[Chip Phillips]

I have been attempting to backup my files with Windows 7 Backup and Restore. I have about 450 gigs or so of info. to backup. It has been about 20 hrs, and it is only 39% done so far. At this rate it will be about 2 days for it to complete. Before doing this, I backed up my stuff manually (drag and drop) and the full amount (450 gigs) took about 6 hrs. I like the scheduling ability of Windows Backup, but is it normal for it to take 2 days!?? Thanks, Chip

Backing up to an external WD 2 TB hard drive.

[-pops-]

That does seem an inordinately long time.

How is the external drive connected to the computer? I've found that there is a very marked difference in transfer speed between USB and SATA external drives (SATA being much faster). Obviously, this speed difference is there all the time but is is only really noticeable with very large files or transfers.

A lot of forum members use Acronis for their backups. From my own experience, Acronis is quicker than the built in Windows program but I've not tried a comparison with a very large backup.

Assuming that a lot of the data you are backing up are stored files, have you considered moving those to a separate drive or partition so that there is not so much for the backup program to do?

There is also the possibility, when you have you full back completed, of carrying out an incremental backup which is much quicker as it only backs up files which have changed since to last backup was done.

[bludgard]

I use Windows Backup and Restore.It does seem to take it's time.Haven't had problems with it yet,so....

It usually takes my rig some 15-20 minutes to back up 50 GB through a USB 2.0 to an external HD.Looking at your timetable,I would say that something has run amok.

If I thought for a minute that things had gone cattywampus,I would be digging around in the Event Viewer logs to see if there were any disk controller errors or the like.I've found them before and used a search engine to define the Event ID and Source to understand what is going on in preparation to solving the issue.Not always the quickest way to cure an illness.Not always easy.Not always fun.But it does give one a sense of satisfaction to track down and assimilate the offenders.:)

As -pops- has suggested,how the external device is connected to your PC will determine transfer speeds.As seen in the screen shot below,I have incurred a couple of disk errors recently.They are most likely caused by my USB connector.It is not causing any noticeable problems so I'll leave it alone for now.I'll try a Firewire connector soon and see if there are any changes.

If your external HD is new,you might consider swapping it for another.I bought a Seagate external and I thought that it had undue vibration.My wife thought I was "exaggerating".

On an impulse,I took it back and tried another one.No vibration and less heat.:D

edit:forgot image