Snapshot Exercise

[Jeff2003]

Hi... Running Retrospect 6.5 on a Windows XP machine.... I am experiencing the same frustration as others with the snapshot creation.

 

I have been experiencing some other problems with Restrospect and external hard drives, so I started getting more involved in the backup process today.

 

I performed a recycle backup this morning that took about 2 hours, which is about what I would have expected.

 

I then wanted to make sure that I wouldn't experience the "Preparing to Execute" problem with the external hard drive I had experienced before, so I added one file to one of my partitions, and I ran a "Normal" backup with Retrospect.

 

It took over 35 minutes to complete the process, with over 25 minutes of it being taken to build a snapshot of the root drive/partition.

 

This may be a naive question; but, in the course of building the snapshot, am I not working the hard drives (RAID 0 configuration) a lot harder than necessary? I guess what I'm really getting at is that it seems like the backup program that I am using is actually making the hard drives more susceptible to failure. I don't know exactly what the MTBF numbers are for the drives; but, in RAID 0, the system time is basically cut in half anyway.... I sure don't want to tax the system more with a software that might drive it over the edge.

 

I'm wondering if it would be better to use software that would be more involved on a restore, but less taxing in operation.

 

Any thoughts?

 

Thanks

 

Jeff

[natew]

Hi

 

I wouldn't worry about it. Any program is going to perform a lot of seek/read/write operations (swap memory will do tons). The drive is designed to handle this so working it too hard isn't an issue.

 

Have you enabled the "back up NTFS security information from workstations" option? This will slow down the snapshot creation significantly. Try turning it off and see if you have better results.

 

Thanks

Nate