KeithParker Posted July 10, 2006 Report Share Posted July 10, 2006 Hi, I'm running Retrospect Single Server 7.5.285 on Windows Server 2003 SP-1. This server is a backup server and performs no other duties. I'm presently running a manual backup set transfer from a backup set called, "Data Files" to another called, "Data Files Archives". Each backup set is on its own 400 GB SATA drive. The "Data Files" backup set is about 157 GB in total size. The transfer is incredibly slow! It is transferring at a rate of about 1.5 GB per HOUR. At this rate it will take days to fully transfer. Is this a normal speed? Please advise-- Keith Parker San Rafael, CA Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nekr0phage Posted July 11, 2006 Report Share Posted July 11, 2006 Hi Keith, I would not call that normal speed for any operation in Retrospect. However, without any errors (either in Retrospect or in Windows event viewer) to point to something specific, I cannot say what exactly would be causing this slowness. Perhaps you should try transferring to backup sets on a few different drives to see if you can find some point that consistently chokes up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KeithParker Posted July 12, 2006 Author Report Share Posted July 12, 2006 Hi, I have more information. I apologize, in advance, for the length of this post, but I was asked to provide more information and to short cut the back and forth I’m providing information that will also cover questions or issues likely to be brought up by others. I hope that an Dantz technical support person can also comment on this. There are no Windows application, security, or system event logs related to the data transfer or in any other way indicating any problems. The computer is only a few months old and is only a Retrospect backup server. The Retrospect logs indicate no difficulties and in fact, regular backups either across the network (all gigabit) or from internal drives, all run at typically greater than 1,000 MB/min. The drives that are being transferred to and from are external SATA drives in a 4 drive JBOD unit. The specific unit is by Addonics and it can handle five hot swappable drives connected to the server via an eSATA cable. The server itself uses a PCI Express eSATA card with extremely high throughput. Prior to setting it up with Retrospect, I performed numerous speed tests with these drives both with drive to drive transfers and internal drive to external drive transfers. This was in Windows, before I put any Retrospect files on there. I used a 4.7 GB zip archive of compressed jpg files for my test file. In speed test the results were fairly consistent and it didn't matter whether I copied the file from an internal SATA drive to an external SATA drive, vice-versa, of from an external SATA drive to an external SATA drive. I got about 2.7 GB per minute about 162 Gigabytes per hour. Needless to say, the speed I'm getting within Retrospect is far, far below that. As a new test, I've deleted my original destination backup set and replaced it with a new, empty one. I'm now attempting a recycle transfer from the 156 GB one to the new empty one. The transfer is taking place from one external SATA drive to another external SATA drive. At periodic intervals, I've recorded the time and how large the destination set was. The current running speed transfer average is 3.7 Gigabytes per hour. At that rate it will take 42 hours to complete. On a related note, I'm currently logged into a client's computer and am performing a similar transfer as she recently had the internal Retrospect backups drive fail. In this case, I've installed the new drive, then plugged in the external USB 2.0 drive (used for offsite backups) and I'm performing a normal (non-recycle) transfer from the offsite drive backup set to the internal drive fresh, clean backup set to pre-seed the internal one. The entire Offsite backup set is 6.77 GB in size. The transfer has been running for about 30 minutes now and the internal drive backup set is now just over 3.0 GB in size, so basically this transfer is running only a bit faster than the one on my own system. I now have multiple data points on two different computer systems at physically different locations performing transfers and the data transfer rates abysmally slow on each system ranging between 4 and 6 GB per hour. At this juncture it appears to be an issue with how Retrospect performs backup set transfers. I would appreciate technical support staff at Dantz weighing in on this issue. Best Regards, Keith Parker San Rafael CA Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KeithParker Posted July 13, 2006 Author Report Share Posted July 13, 2006 This problem may be resolved. Using Windows, I copied the entire source backup set to a different drive to have a copy of it. Then I performed a recycle backup on the original which resulted in about 70 GB of data being backed up. Then I performed a transfer from that set to the archives backup set and it ran in about 45 minutes, as expected. Not really sure what was wrong with the original source backup of 156 GB. During a transfer it would get up to around 45 GB and then just slow to a crawl. Things seem to be functioning normally now. KP Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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