MR backups suddenly taking twice as long

Attachment 258929

I think MR7 started weirding out around the time of the latest Win10 CU. My C drives (w/ Win10) is taking exponentially longer to merge the previous incremental with the 00-00 mrimg file.



Here's the old time it used to take to finish about a week ago vs. the newer time...



Comparatively, here's the D drive (data), older vs. newer time...



No real change. That's why I think it has to do with the OS CU. No major changes to my PC in quite a long time.

Boot time & performance are all doing fine, no changes.
Always been using the same USB3.1 port to my Seagate Backup Plus Drive.

Though I've never had any warning within MR7, maybe I have a kinda messed-up incremental within my batch. ?

Corona said:

I think MR7 started weirding out around the time of the latest Win10 CU. My C drives (w/ Win10) is taking exponentially longer to merge the previous incremental with the 00-00 mrimg file. ..

Have you looked at the sizes of the incrementals? They may be large and that's what's taking the time.

One thing that can dramatically increase the size of the next incremental is if your drive is an HDD and it has been defragmented since the last image. The files won't have changed, but the sectors they occupy will be different. I keep scheduled optimisation turned off in 'Defragment and optimise drives'.

Hi there
The more stuff differentials have to merge etc it's going to take longer --simply there's more work to do.

What perhaps you should do now is take a complete new backup -- I wouldn't in any case recommend more than around 3 levels of differential backups anyway e.g current, last one and one before that -- depending on data volumes and amount of changes.

@Bree -- modern drives --HDD's don't need defragging -- I haven't bothered with defragging ever since Windows Millenium !! never found it made any difference whatsoever to the performance of the HDD's and those defragging routines usually run FOR HOURS. -- if you've got some largish files spread over disk use something like treesize to analyse -- copy files to new / temp device, delete old files and then copy back.

I've also found absolute quickest way of re-organising a volume if I need to is to copy the files to a Linux disk via any file manager, reformat original HDD and then copy files back. As I've got 2 NAS systems running 24/7 it's easy enough to do -- even for large HDD's can run the job overnight if necessary. Use dd to copy the disk --saves messing around with file systems but don't dd it back otherwise you'll have the identical disk image -- copy files back via file manager or whatever though.

On Windows you can still image the HDD with Macrium, mount the image and then you can browse it and restore files via file explorer -- reformat target disk first of course.

Cheers
jimbo

dalchina said:

Umm,, sorry, I think you meant incrementals?

Yes, sorry about that.

dalchina said:

After an upgrade, create a new base image and start the cycle again.

That's what I needed to hear. Makes total sense.

I have each drive (C & D) set up for 'Forever Incremental'. For each drive, after 30 Incrementals are created they glom together to become a Full. And then each new Incremental eventually merges with the Full.
What I'm realizing now after your post (and the other guys before you) is that before any new CU takes a hefty dump on my PC, I should save the last Full (of C drive...my OS drive) and start a new incremental backup task for that drive.

Should I delete all my other older previous Fulls of that C drive? If I save any on that backup drive, in order to keep MR from incorporating them into any new backup job, maybe I should rename them somehow? What do you guys do in this case?

- - - Updated - - -

Jimbo and Bree, my C drive is an SSD. I never defrag it. I haven't defragged anything since XP. The backing up of a few older Fulls is an excellent idea. But do I save on my target drive, or create a (shudder) ISO??

Bastet said:

The only time I’ve seen this is when I hadn’t deleted the Windows.old folder after an update. You might want to check that.

I just did. Not there. But that would've made total sense.