Slow initial backup

Getting Help
1

Hey, first time user. I have a 200 gig drive on Win10 that I’m trying to backup to a USB flash drive. It appears to be on pace to complete this backup in 16 hours. It’s only about 28,000 files. I assume this isn’t normal; why might it be so slow? How might I make it faster? I don’t think my drives are the limitation as I’ve seen them perform much faster than this before

I’m not sure, but it seems it may be taking restic very long to process multimedia (video, audio) files in particular - but I can’t really tell if that’s just due to their size (being a gig or two each) or if it’s actually slowing down whenever it hits one

Any help appreciated

2

What’s the source, and how is it connected and what are its specifications? You have to be more specific :stuck_out_tongue:

3

Sure,

Source is one of these: Seagate Mobile ST2000LM007 2TB 2.5" 512e SATA HDD

Destination is one of these: SanDisk Ultra Fit USB 3.1 Flash Drive | Western Digital Store

Some laptop specs:

  • Intel® Core™ i7-7500U CPU @ 2.70GHz
  • 16.0 GB RAM
  • Windows 10 Home v.20H2

…in the task manager I can see that for the process ‘restic.exe’, the ‘Disk’ is usually in the range of 0.5-3.0 MB/s (but infrequently spiking up to 30-40 MB/s before coming right back down)

4

I think the problem is that this flash drive has extremely slow non-sequential writes. See screenshots of CrystalDiskMark in this review.

2 Likes
5

Great find - I suppose that could be the issue (not totally up to speed myself on the difference between sequential & non-sequential writes as it pertains to flash storage) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Will probably try to accomplish the backup in batches then (I understand you can just stop and start it at any time & it’ll pick up where it left off, yea?) - thanks for the help!

6

If you have some spare space, you can create a backup repository on you HDD and copy it to flash drive after the initial backup.

7

Do you have AV software active when running the backup?

8

Before making this thread I did happen across a post on Stackoverflow where someone recommended turning off Windows Defender; I tried adding an exclusion for restic on one of my tries, but it didn’t seem to make a difference

9

Yep, correct. You can cancel/stop restic while it’s backing up, and re-run it later one or more times to complete the missing parts of the backup.