Extreme Slowness

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Retrospect Extreme Slowness Problem:

 

 

 

Backup is performed on our P4 Win XP PC, which has a 40gig HD drive in a removable chassis, called drive A, as the backup medium. Also have a 2nd 40 gig HD in removable chassis, called drive B, for second/alternate backup. Each drive has its own drive id/letter assigned to it. Drives are inserted when PC is off (not hot swappable). Backup procedure was:

 

Create “backup set A”, with backup as “file” to drive A. Select files/folders and backup. NTFS workstation security info. is not backed up.

 

1st backup goes pretty fast – backing up 13gigs of data takes a little over 60 minutes. Next day swap drive A with drive B and create “backup set B”. Backup same data/options as “backup set A”. Back done in same time. Next day, put drive A in PC and backup. Since recycle is off, backup is done in less than 5 minutes (each day about 30-300 megs of new data is all that would be backed up, so backup is very very fast). Next day, insert drive B and run backup at end of work day – now backup takes nearly 60 minutes just to back up around 30-300 megs of new data/files. Retrospect sits with no signs of progress on the status bar, then around 55 minutes later begins the actual backup – the actual file copy taking only 3-5 minutes at most. If we go back to drive A the next day, back is fine, taking only 3-5 minutes, but if we try B again it takes around 60 minutes.

 

 

 

Of course there is more:

 

After doing the backup this way for several months (many times simply not doing the “backup set B” due to time constraints – the original intent is to run alternating backups at the end of each day, and them removing either drive A or B for off site storage, reinserting either drive A or B the next morning), started fresh, recycling backup sets A & B. Now, the second time either backup is run, each backup takes nearly 60 minutes (again to just backup 30-300megs of new data/files). Also when backup B is run, it always reports an error that one file is damaged and can not be backed up. Interestingly, backup A reports no error regarding the particular file (which is not damaged and can be opened/modified with no problems).

 

 

 

I have searched through the knowledge base and read about slow catalog scans/rebuilds, with it being attributed to either having the Win 2000/XP NTFS security data back up option ON, or possibly have Norton Anti-Virus auto-protect ON, or having slow hardware, or older Retrospect versions – which may be slower. In our case, we disabled Norton Anti-Virus, the NTFS backup option is off, and the hardware is fast (P4 1.5 GHz, 512 ram, ATA 100 hard drives – the removable hard drives performance slightly exceeds the built-in ATA 100 hard drive), and have Retrospect version 5.6.127 w/driver 2.8 update installed – so what is causing this unacceptable extreme slowness??? It makes no sense that backing just a few files takes nearly as long as it would to backup all our 13+gigs of data files. Any suggestions/ideas would be greatly appreciated – otherwise probably will have to use another vendor’s backup solution! Thanks.

 

 

 

(PS, before we had Win XP we used Win 98 and Retrospect Express never did exhibited this extreme slow down)