Windows 7 "Backup and Restore" program.

[Grandpappy]

I've just completed a "Backup and Restore" of my C: drive (62.4Gb) to my J: external drive using the program supplied with 7, but why should it take over 4 1/2 hrs.to create an image of such a sized drive?
Nothing else was running.
Any idea's or is this normal and if so; are there any faster programs out there?
Cheers

[Vagrant]

"are there any faster programs out there" -
as a general rule, program speed is determined by the hardware it's running on.
It could be that your C: or J: drive have errors - are there any error messages while running?
How is the external drive connected?
What king of PC? If laptop, is it on battery or mains?
Have you defragmented the C: drive?

[ChuckFickens]

Doesn't seem to far off to be, windows7 tries to compress it's backups which makes it slower (and it will be even slower if it's to a 2.5inch external hard drive)

The good news is that it should only be the first backup that takes ages, subsequent backups should only copy what has changed, not the whole lot again so should only take a few minutes.

[squarebear]

Personally I would do a full backup each time rather than an incremental (the things that have changed). If you are trying to restore from a full backup and something goes wrong, you can always go back to your previous one. With an incremental, you are relying on several backups being vaild. If just one of these is unusuable, you will not be able to restore.

4.5 hours doesn't seem unreasonable for 60Gb.

[VHG]

62Gb is a load of data.

Even just copying 62Gb of data from one hard disk to another is going to take quite while.

And it depends how much it is compressing the data while copying, compression does take time.

We seem to forget nowadays how much data we have on our computers.

I am sure many of us can remember when our hard disk were measured in MB not GB (I think my first hard disk was 10Mb)

[Charlie911]

Like many people I used to run XP and it was easy peasy to do a backup/restore. But my Windows 7 takes ages. I suppose that's what you call progress?

[Grandpappy]

Hi all.
I've just done a full backup (62.5Gb) from C: to J: using the default settings with Easeus Todo-Backup,a free program in 1hr.03Mins.-the compressed size was 56.8Gb. I'm using Windows 7 32bit running at 2.8Ghz with 4Gb of ram. The program can be found at www.todo-backup.com and as I've said it's free! I don't know yet if it can do incremental backups, but as has been mentioned, problems can be caused with that type of backup. So a FULL backup once a week seems to be the way for me .