Macrium Reflect creating full disk image QNAP NAS too slow

I have always been a big fan of Macrium Reflect and have several images on several USB drives around the place.

Recently I have purchased a QNAP TS453Be (8G memory) which I am amazed it took me this long to get one. With 4x4TB NAS drives in raid 5 configuration. Very happy with it.

I have copied all my data from my desktop to my NAS just getting the hang of things, no issues there.

However when I transferred data that way I had to string a blue CAT 6 cable across the entire house which was not winning any popularity votes from my significant other half. SO I am back to connecting over WIFI which limits me to about 50Mb/s I know. Not ideal but not really much other option at the moment.

So last night I decided to create a full image backup to a folder on the NAS. After all, I do have roughly 10TB of space, so why not do a lazy image once a month to the NAS?

So 24 hours later and Macrium Reflect still has 3 hours to go creating a full disk image of my SSD which is a Samsung SSD Pro 1TB. The amount of used data is about 750GB.

It doesn't take nearly as long to make that image to a USB 3 drive....

If I do the math I think it goes like this:

750GB=750000MB
number of seconds to transfer 750000MB @ 50Mb/s = 15000 seconds = 250 minutes = 4.2 hours.

I know that maybe a rough calc, but I just can't see how it can be taking this long?

Has anybody had any experience with creating images over NAS?

I thought it would be quite good to have another layer of protection before I make some pretty significant changes to my file structure ie. declutter!!!

Also, I am curious to know:
1. Does a disk image age on a USB3 drive? I have heard of "bit flop" which is a worry....
2. If a "bit flop" did occur, does that render the whole image file corrupt?
3. Is it possible to copy disk image files, which are so large?

I've copied Macrium disk images without incident.......SSD to HDD, HDD to HDD, internal to internal, internal to external via USB, etc.

As far as I can see, Windows treats them like any other large file.

I don't use an NAS.

My images are circa 25 GB for a circa 40 GB (occupied) disk. Takes about 5 minutes, saved directly to an internal SSD.

juzzie said:

750GB=750000MB
number of seconds to transfer 750000MB @ 50Mb/s = 15000 seconds = 250 minutes = 4.2 hours.

My calculation is different

750 GB = 750*1024 = 768000 MB
50 Mb/s = 50/8 = 6.25 MB/s
Time to transfer = 122880 s = 2048 min = 34.1 h

Hi,

I have an old NAS DS212+ & it takes approx 25 min to transfer a backup 107GB, 112,704,570 in size @ 30MB/s (MeggaBytes average transfer rate).

So your about right @ 3.5 to 4.2 hours.

ignatzatsonic said:

I've copied Macrium disk images without incident.......SSD to HDD, HDD to HDD, internal to internal, internal to external via USB, etc.

As far as I can see, Windows treats them like any other large file.

It sounds like you run pretty lean and mean on your system drive which is something I aspire to one day!

Does anybody else in here have a experience copying and reusing large disk images? What is the largest image you would think you could copy...?

I can copy files direct to the NAS from a USB3 drive... Sooooooo....

What would the experts think would be an upper limit on the size of those files?

I will give it a go with my system first coming in at a rather hefty 100Gb. That should be squashed to ~ 80GB I suppose.

My 1TB SSD is split into 4 partitions I think, the 2 main ones are my C: drive system @250GB and data @750GB

My process will be:

1. Full disk image macrium reflect C:drive system; 100Gb --> 80Gb to USB3 portable hard drive connected to computer;
2. Connect USB3 to NAS box;
3. Copy MR image to NAS box folder;
4. Mount MR image via the NAS to see if it works.

(Mind you I am not an MR expert. The most advanced I have gotten is taking a disk image of my original 120GB SSD system hard drive, installing a new 1TB SSD harddrive, then put the MR image on the new SSD and it worker flawlessly. That's why I like it MR: it works!)

Any flaws in that plan?

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Lottiemansion said:

Hi,

I have an old NAS DS212+ & it takes approx 25 min to transfer a backup 107GB, 112,704,570 in size @ 30MB/s (MeggaBytes average transfer rate).

So your about right @ 3.5 to 4.2 hours.

If I understand correctly, you are transferring a 107GB MR image?

Yes that is correct, various drive backups copied to NAS for safety, the largest file is 129GB, keeping the original on computer hard drive.