Backup taking very long

[rweb611]

I'm in the process of restoring Vista home premium to factory settings. In the process it asks to create backup (recommended) . What is the backup for and why does it take so long?
The backup has been running for 4 hours so far.
It shows that the size of the backup is 1.86GB.
I'm backing up to a 2.0 gb usb drive.
Any comments?

 

[techgeek]

It shouldn't take that long. 1.86GB is 1860MB. Over USB 2.0 you get a maximum transfer rate of 20MB/s. Now maximum only comes into play when you are moving big files. With lots of smaller files this can drop as low as 5MB/s. So worst case scenario, 1860 / 5 = 372 seconds which works out to 74.4 minutes, so an hour and a quarter. Now it could be that the backup is doing some funky compression which could be adding some time, but it shouldn't take 4 hours.

Your are saying that your are restoring to factory settings, so I can assume this is an OEM machine and your are using the manufacturer's utility for doing this. So if I'm correct, the backup is for backing up your personal files located in User Files (music, pictures, videos etc). When you reset to factory settings, the utility is going to completely wipe the HDD (probably delele and recreate the partition) and re-install windows and all the software that came with your computer. So when it's finished it will be exactly like the day you bought it. You'll have a long process of Windows updates following this. There must be some provision in the manufacturers utility to restore the backup to your computer once it's finished. This should put your personal files back to their original locations.

Hope that helps.