What is taking Windows 7 backup so fscking long?

[TrogL]

I moved some data from my external USB 1 Tb drive to my internal drive. It took about 2 hours. I deleted the data on the drive and defragged it.

Now I'm running Windows Backup. It's 24 hours and counting and only 40% done.

WTF is going on?

[struggle4progress]

1. How much data is involved? And how does the backup work?

I have no experience with Windows Backup

Cloning a large drive can take a while, and it'll be slower over USB. I backup a few of my larger and more important directories on a network drive -- and that can take a few hours, even though I'm not backing up the whole disk

My main machine is OSX, and my primary backup method is Time Machine -- but the very first pass through Time Machine on any on my machines took hour and hours for processing and transfer of many gigabytes, though subsequent incremental backups are much faster

[pokerfan]

2. Putting the 'doze' in Windoze

http://www.sevenforums.com/performance-maintenance/37150-windows-backup-extremely-slow.html">Windows 7 - Windows Backup - Extremely Slow

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/windowsbackup/thread/9041ed71-ae37-4039-a622-0087497ecbb0">Windows 7 backup is incredibly slow

http://forums.techarena.in/operating-systems/1298213.htm">Backup process extremely slow in windows 7

http://channel9.msdn.com/forums/Coffeehouse/485484-Win-7-file-backup-is-sloooooow/">Win 7 file backup is sloooooow

[Jersey Devil]

3. Had similar problems - my fix

It has to do with Windows trying to write very large files to an external USB drive, something a lot of people have trouble with.

So what I did is create another partition on my main hard drive and made by backup image there. After doing so I copied and pasted it to my external hard drive using Terabytes, a free program that in addition to helping copy files, also does a CRC check to make sure that what you are copying is not corrupted in the process.

[canetoad]

4. This is nothing to do with Win7 backup

I use a backup method that utilises two very simple freeware programs. First I regularly make an ISO of my work folders using DeepBurner, which is simple, stable and accepts long filenames. Rough guide - about 15 mins to burn ISO of 20g folders.

Then if I need a file from the backup - Daemon Tools to mount the ISO as a virtual drive and grab what I need.

Not interested in mirroring my Windows installation. If it buggers up enough that it needs to be restored, it's probably time for a reload anyway. But just to back up files, using ISO is quick and reliable.