Backup to NAS Too Slow

[Clocker]

Hi-
I have a 250GB SimpleTech SimpleShare NAS. I really like it except it has one problem. When I run my automated backups of about 100GB of (mostly unchanged) data to it, it takes a long long time even none of my archived files have changed.

Right now I'm using a program called Backup Magic with Task Scheduler and it does incremental backups. But it still takes a long time. It runs pretty quick(<1min) when I backup to my secondary hard drive (locally).

I think I need a program like RSync but my understanding is that both the NAS and the client have to have the software running. I don't believe I can change the software on the SimpleShare at all.

Is there some smarter backup software that will allow the backups to the simpleshare NAS be smarter/more efficient?

Thanks,
C

 

[ddrueding]

The first thing I would do is benchmark the NAS' write speed. Some of those things are really slow.

If the backup to your other local drive is quick, I don't think different software would help you.

 

[Clocker]

Thanks. The write speed is about 5MB/sec just using a 520MB file and a stopwatch. I was hoping some smarter software would be able to help but maybe not...

 

[ddrueding]

I use the free program from Microsoft called SyncToy and it works really well. It is fairly smart in that it looks at the source and destination first and only copies over the files that have changed.

Of course, even this requires the destination to be read for comparison purposes. This may be your bottleneck.

 

[Clocker]

Thanks. SyncToy must be much smarter. What took about 3 hours before now takes about 3.5 min. Sweet! I'll just have to look up running SyncToy as a scheduled task if possible.

Thanks again!

 

[ddrueding]

If you figure out how to schedule SyncToy, post it here. I'm curious about that as well.

 

[Jan Kivar]

I think one could also use Unison File Synchronizer. It has a fastcheck option, which only uses file size and modify/create times. The Unison project was moved to non-development status earlier this year.

The latest stable version has a DST "bug" on Windows platforms, which slows the file scanning if DST is applied (and is actually caused by a "feature" in Windows), but it is fixed on the latest beta version (according to the changelog).

Unison is though a bit more complex to setup than SyncToy, I'm afraid. And it is, as the name implies, a file synchronizer. So it is capable of deleting files/directories from the backup if they get deleted on the source. But I think that same applies for SyncToy as well.

Cheers,

Jan

 

[Fushigi]

Get SyncToy 1.4 and do Help - Learn how to schedule SyncToy.