I’m currently using Restic to create a backup of my Windows system, but I’m running into an issue with the backup process taking an incredibly long time to complete. Here are some details about my setup:
Operating System: Windows 10
Processor Intel Core 2 Duo
RAM: DDR2
Storage:** 512 GB hard drive (with 200 GB of data to back up)
Backup Source: 200 GB drive with approximately 28,000 files
Backup Destination: USB flash drive
Estimated Completion Time 16 hours
It seems like Restic is processing multimedia files (videos and audio) particularly slowly, which might be contributing to the lengthy backup time. I’m looking for any advice on how to optimize the backup process to make it faster.
Has anyone else experienced similar issues with Restic on Windows? What steps did you take to improve the backup speed? Are there any specific settings or best practices that could help in this situation?
Any suggestions or insights would be greatly appreciated!
hello @taniabeckya
looking at your hardware i would estimate it is well over 10yr old and not very powerful. Your destination is a USB flash drive (do you even have USB2/USB3 ports?) which can take a long time to write to.
Potential bottlenecks that i estimate from your current information:
slow cpu. you can disable compression to reduce the load on the cpu.
slow storage. change the usb flash drive to something faster, preferably not connected via USB.
The best thing to do is to monitor your computer (task manager) and conclude on what keeps it busy. Is the CPU fully loaded, or the storage, or memory, or all? That will allow you to decide on a good next step.
p.s. my experience on windows is that it runs fine, but I have a recent laptop with planty of cpu power, memory and fast storage.
p.p.s. one thing to remember is that restic will run faster after the first backup is completed, as it only needs to check for changes and not read all the data.
In addition to what GuitarBilly said, if you’re using max compression, you should probably not if it’s mostly multimedia. You might even consider not using compression at all, if it’s all multimedia files.
Is that a 200GB SSD or HDD? A 5Gbps or 10Gbps thumb drive? Ever do a benchmark on the drive and see how fast it writes?