Windows 10 October 2018 Update rollout now paused

Hi there

I find backing up to an external old laptop 1 TB HDD using medium (default) compression works perfectly fast enough - CPU doesn't seem to matter here between an i5 and an i7 -- while I normally backup to an external SSD I have a few old laprop 2.5 inch spinners which I connect to computer with SATA-->USB3 connector. Laptop SSD's though are 7200 rpm not 5400 rpm.

I use the laptop HDD's for backing up test builds etc so I don't mix up with my standard backups.

Average windows backup time is around 12 - 15 mins, restore is slightly quicker as restore is to SSD and read time from the external spinner is quicker than writes - not needed in restore (and can be buffered too to overlap the I/O calls).

I would surmise that compressing backups to high level would only work in 2 instances -- if the cpu was powerful enough to efficiently compress concurrently with read / write and the data was of a type that could gain a lot via compression e.g text files etc. Highly compressed files such as binary don't really compress much further anyway so the gain in any case would IMO be questionable.

The best way if you need speed is to have the fastest possible I/O devices that the computer can handle with huge cache sizes too if you can get them.

Cheers
jimbo

I had a failure the other day with Macrium. It was with an 1809 image. I suppose it is possible I did something wrong.. it was on a slower USB flash drive that I don't normally use though I'm sure it was formatted ok. Scared me at first because after it failed a minute or so after starting upon leaving the Macrium rescue OS the laptop wouldn't start. Then I got it to start but it stated I needed to install OS or something. So then I restarted with my 1803 image from the day before and that installed fine so all is ok. In any case, I'm slightly less trusting of this now and also glad I had mult images. Don't think I'll start using additional programs though. Since 1809's launch I've used M I believe three times, before that never.

Hi there

@Bree regarding Audio / video.

any sensible audio / video media playback program should include a decent amount of bufferring -- i.e store a decent amount of data in RAM before starting and keep filling up buffer while playing so even slowish devices would perform more than decently.

Although I am always in favour of fast I/O devices I really have to laugh (really I should cry !!) when people say get large expensive SSD's so your video playback will perform better. If you have large older spinners nothing wrong in storing multi-media files on those.

SSD's are absolutely fine for say Database Indexes (say large MySQL / MariaDB searches etc) , the system OS, temporary data such as paging / swapping areas and for any sort of scratch / edit areas for things like photoshop, video editing , taking backups etc.

When TB size SSD's are of comparable price to standard spinners then all this will become irrelevant anyway -- hopefully within a very few years this will happen.

Cheers
jimbo

Macrium is the best for me , takes some more time but is most reliable !
Second is Acronis and Aomei , only using these when Macrium fails ( which I never encountered....)

jimbo45 said:

@Bree regarding Audio / video. any sensible audio / video media playback program should include a decent amount of bufferring...

True, but the point I was making is that applying ntfs compression to any reasonably large file will fragment it. It's not really something you'd want to inflict on an HDD that holds your OS and programs - and if you must, then be prepared to spend a lot of time de-fragmenting it afterwards