How long do your image backups take - Full Disk vs Diff vs Increment?

Just wanting to get an idea of backup completion times from other users out here...

I use the forum favorite Macrium Reflect for my image backups. Last night I ran a full image backup of my C: & D: drives and it took approx 2 hrs & 50 mins for a full disk backup + image verification. Total amount of data was ~450GB compressed to a MReflect 350GB image. It was clear the bottleneck during the transfer was my 2TB My Passport as my boot & storage drives are an M.2 1TB NVMe SSD & a 2.5" 500GB SSD respectively.

So, how long do your backups take on average & how often do you do these? Please state what program you use as well as the storage mediums you have as the source & destination (e.g tradition external HDD or a off-site/on-site NAS hardwired). And would also like to know if others use the image verification feature as well.

4.5 min, HDD -> USB 3.0. System only (ESP, OS, Recovery partitions), no data. Transfer "speeds" using USB are very variable.

dalchina said:

I would look at the transfer rate- I think mine was around 7-800MB/s - I know it seemed surprisingly high.

That seems to be the rate of data being read from the source drive. Compression means that this can be significantly higher than the actual rate being written to the image on the destination drive.

Using AOMEI to make weekly base images to which I add diferentials daily. I've used incrementals (which AOMEI provides) and found them 100% reliable, however differentials have to be (and are) safer and so I use those. Little if any difference in the time needed for these, I would say around 1 min 40 seconds or so to complete. Full base image takes around 2min 25 secs. 70Gb partition with around 30Gb in use.

Destination for these is a separate partition on main drive (which I call running backups) with these being transferred at a later date to a USB drive. AOMEI also does a similar function to Windows File History. That runs once daily, again to a separate partition and again is archived at a later date to USB drive. Regular simple copies of documents etc are transferred over to flash drive when I feel the need to do so.

dalchina said:

That's the rate shown in the Macrium dialogue.. without doing one I can't add more.

Yes, I have had Macrium making an image and along side it Task Manager showing the disk write speed for the external HDD. The rate Macrium shows is always higher than the data rate written to the HDD, so I assumed it must be measuring the source read speed.

The OP needs to post the thruput #'s he is seeing with Macrium. As he suspects, its probably the Passport device.

My backups using Macrium, have a working set size of 240gb, all data resides on 2 SSD's on Sata6 connections, output is a WD black 1tb attached to Sata6. Full backup runs average 46 min elapse time. Macrium R/W stats are: Read 369.7 MB/s - Write 214.1 MB/s. The backups sets are then moved from WD Black drive to a USB 3.1 removable enclosure running RAID 1. Performance there sucks, but I have redundancy !

With out knowing the OP's rate, I think the almost 3hr for 350gb is excessive.

storageman said:

The OP needs to post the thruput #'s he is seeing with Macrium. As he suspects, its probably the Passport device.

My backups using Macrium, have a working set size of 240gb, all data resides on 2 SSD's on Sata6 connections, output is a WD black 1tb attached to Sata6. Full backup runs average 46 min elapse time. Macrium R/W stats are: Read 369.7 MB/s - Write 214.1 MB/s. The backups sets are then moved from WD Black drive to a USB 3.1 removable enclosure running RAID 1. Performance there sucks, but I have redundancy !

With out knowing the OP's rate, I think the almost 3hr for 350gb is excessive.

Valid point

I decided to reference my MReflect log files and this was the info I got from my most recent backup...

• During the last backup, Macrium made a full disk image & followed by a verification (as I stated above).
• Then a full image & differential image were deleted posterior (I set it up this way)
• I/O performance: Read 574.5 MB/s & Write 81.4 MB/s
• Image & verification successfully completed in 02:51:34

So it looks like the write speed is the limiting factor. Also, my 2TB external was over 70% capacity (I use it exclusively to backup both my desktop & laptop via MReflect) so I would expect that mitigates the write performance of the drive.

Your times are correct and would be expected.

I do exactly the same full disk image plus verification with Macrium, but from a standard HDD to a NAS box 1 Gbs wired which has 2 mirrored 2 TB WD Red HDD.

I know the limitation on mine is the NAS box and the source/target HDDs.

I do that approximately once per month, I don't use Differential or Incremental, too complicated. KISS principles.

In your system it would likely be the 2 TB Passport drive. The source drives being SSD won't make a hoot of difference.

In post #9 you have mistakenly quoted your Macrium speeds as 574 MB/s and 81 MB/s, those are bits not Bytes.
so 574 Mb/s and 81 Mb/s.

Divide by 8 to get MB/s.

I have looked at my Macrium logs most recent image (230 GB) and the numbers are:
I/O performance: Read 748 Mb/s - Write 187 Mb/s
Image and Verification Completed Successfully in 04:36:27