How long should a full backup take? Incremental? Big time difference in recreated tsk

[admin]

Backup performance mainly depends on the performance of the source disk and the destination disk. CPU performance is also an important factor, but newer CPUs are typically powerful enough and usually do not become a bottleneck. Therefore, priority should be given to the read/write speed of the source and destination drives.

As for how long the backup takes, in addition to source/destination disk performance, the total amount of data to be backed up is another major determining factor. When the backup time is significantly longer than expected, it is recommended to troubleshoot in the following order:

1. Check whether the source disk or destination disk has performance issues (e.g., poor cable connection, connected to a low-speed USB port, or bad sectors).
   
2. Check whether the "Sector by sector backup" option is mistakenly enabled. This mode forces the software to read every sector of the entire disk, significantly reducing backup speed and making incremental backups take nearly as long as full backups.
   

[khanyash]

Mine is a Windows 11 Pro laptop with 8GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD. The C drive is currently occupying approx. 65GB of space out of 120GB. I perform a system backup with incremental backups on a daily schedule, using the default backup settings. The full backup takes just over a minute, the incremental backup completes in under a minute, and the delta restore process finishes within a minute.

[AdvancedSetup]

Thanks for the feedback @khanyash

[admin]

We often receive user feedback about encountering error code 0x1B1 ("A device which does not exist was specified.") when backing up to a USB drive, which is actually caused by the USB drive going offline automatically. Does anyone have good solutions or preventive suggestions for this issue?

Examples are as follows:
https://www.easyuefi.com/forums/thread-4...l#pid13158
https://www.easyuefi.com/forums/thread-4...l#pid11415

[al3x]

Shouldn’t it be enough to write and delete a new small text file every minute or so? Maybe Windows doesn’t recognize the constant write stream caused by the backup? But that would still be quite strange.

[Froggie]

In all my use of USB drives (as well as UFDs), I've never seen a drive designed to automatically go off-line (usually only controlled by software, if needed).  Yes, many have sleep induced delays (Large HDDs especially spin down after a set inactivity period then spin back up when needed) but that operation never induces an off-line flag of any kind within Windows... it's always on-line just a bit slow when starting operations.

Possibly the dock being used for the drive may be doing something programmatically but I've never seen that as well.  A drive going off-line is almost always a result of bad cables/connections or a flakey USB port.

[Froggie]

...and remember, if the external USB device IS NOT self powered (separate power connection to the dock/holding case) then the device gets its power from the USB connector.  With these types of connections, power surges are definitely experienced when READ or WRITE operations get extensive.  That's why the cable ends (power pins for power) and/or the receiving port can really cause issues if the cable seating isn't ideal.