Backing up 280 GB of Music..Why is it taking 11+ Hours ?

[jamesrwright]

I have two external 1 TB drives-WD Mybooks-One is a Premium II-the other is just a regular WD Mybook
Not sure what is going on here..I backed up my videos..about 380 GB worth last night..took about 5 hours.
Today I am backing up my Mp3 portion of the drive-280 GB. It says it has 10 hours left????
Why is it taking longer despite the fact there is 100 GB less data in the mp3 collection?
This is crazy. Anything I can do to speed it up? Both are connected via firewire.

 

[roadrunner197069]

Maybe you shoulda defreagged before the backup. Probably bits of files all over on a music storage. Seek times will kill you time.

 

[jamesrwright]

My system automatically defragments disks every night..its Vista.

 

[roadrunner197069]

Run HD tune on your HDDs and see if they are under performing.

 

[aevm]

Maybe it's just that videos are usually made of 1GB files while mp3s are usually 4 to 8 MB each. 100 GB in videos means a lot fewer files than 100GB in mp3s.

 

[cjl]

A bunch of smaller files tends to take a lot longer than a few huge files. I wouldn't worry too much.

 

[malveaux]

Heya,

It's saying that due to the number of files you're copying. If you copied a single 300gig file, it would take very little time. But when you have to write lots of files, regardless of their size, Windows will calculate a lot of extra time into the effort as it has to set all those separate strings of data to go some where, write them, and update the index so that you can retreive that data. Each file your write takes extra time beyond the physical writing of it, ie, all the information it takes to know where and what those individual writes are. It will say it will take 11 hours, but you'll find about half way through, it will reupdate and lower that number. And in the end, likely not take 11 hours, but much less.

If you want it to happen fast without the annoying "this'll take all day!" kind of message, do it with the command prompt.

Go to Start -> Run
Type "CMD"

It will open a terminal that looks like DOS.

Go to your music folder, and use the copy command to put all that music on your external.
Example: Assume C: is your primary drive; assume Z: is your external backup drive.
Example command: copy *.* Z:\music
It'll just start copying without the annoying time count. Plus, you'll see it actually copy every file and how fast it goes.

Cheers,

 

[skittle]

or the more useful command, "xcopy"

To see command switches and syntax, do "xcopy /?" or "copy /?"

you can set a batch file to automatically create new backups, specifying to only copy files created after certain dates, or only new files, or only copy the directory tree... etc. (this could save you time and frustration in the future!)

 

[slagbom]

now this is a helpful thread. bookmarked forever!

Wait, it works on XP I hope also?

 

[superfuzzy]

or the more useful command, "xcopy"

To see command switches and syntax, do "xcopy /?" or "copy /...

better yet use xxcopy