Incremental backup speed

general discussion
1

Hi,
I’m coming to urbackup from windows home server 2003 which has served me very well for a long time but urbackup allows me to free up the machine for other things.

I have urbackup setup to incrementally backup several computers daily with a minimum of 2 incremental backups and a maximum of 5.

I find urbackup to be very slow at backing up compared to WHS. I took a full image backup of 2 machines yesterday, one was around 136gig in size the other around 60gig.

The 136gig computer to 516 minutes to complete, and the 60 gig computer 238 minutes. Today the first incremental backup of the 136gig computer took 136 minutes and a further 30gig of storage space, whilst the 60gig machines first incremental backup took 85 minutes and a further 12gig of space.

Almost nothing had changed on the machines from yesterday to today.

Now, the transfer time is about right for the speed of my network and the amount of data transferred, however why is so much more data than I expected being transferred during the incremental backups?

2

It will not be as fast as WHS for incremental image backups. Because there is no easy way to find out which bits changed on the volumes UrBackup needs to scan (read) the whole volume. I think WHS has access to information what changed.

With regards to the large size of the incremental image backups: I investigated this once. It may be the page file and the shadow storage that is causing this. That is, when I reduced the size of the shadow storage via

vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=C: /On=C: /MaxSize=200MB

The number of differences was smaller. I may have to look into if it is possible to exclude the shadow storage somehow.