[herc]

I am using a Dell Dimension 4300 PC with Windows XP Home OS with Service Pack 3. The hard drive on the PC is only 40 GB’s. I am backing up this drive to a WD 120 GB’s external hard drive. These backups using Syncback software are taking an inordinately long time to complete. I recently deleted approximately 5 GB’s from my hard drive and my backup took almost 3 hours to complete. It shows that I have over 290,000 files to backup. There must be something wrong with the way I have asked for the back up to be done because it seems to be copying all the files each time. I only want to backup any new files or files that have changed. Previously it always took less than an hour to do a backup. Is there a setting I can use that will do only an incremental backup, i.e. only new or changed files or synchronise in one direction only? Is there some other action I should take to improve the backup time?

As always thanks in advance for any help,

herc

[stantley]

What does the log say? Is it copying all of the files?

The default location of the logs is C:\Program Files\2BrightSparks\SyncBack.

[herc]

Hi stantley,

Thanks for the quick reply. Although it shows 146 pages of log backup it states that a very large number of files are "not in source,Skipping"!

Regards,

herc

[fairnooks]

Every once in a while its a good thing to refresh a backup data base or start a new initial backup. The program is probably spending an inordinate amount of time cross-referencing and verifying all the files that are in the backup that no longer exist in the source.

Starting a new backup from the current data on the system is the safest way to approach a refresh. Then after some time and if you find you no longer need any of the files in the old backup that are not found in the source, and you need the room, you can delete that backup and continue with the new.
The less safe way, and what I do is alter the profile of the backup once every so often for one run to actually delete all the files (advanced setting) in the destination (backup) that are no longer in the source. I of course only do this when I'm at least 99.9% sure that all the files I deleted from the source were indeed deleted on purpose.

146 pages is about 134 pages more than the longest list that I've ever had so I'm pretty sure you just have so many files it has to keep checking each time, slowing things significantly.

[herc]

Hi fairnooks,

I did as you suggested and did a backup by "the less safe way' and deleted the files on the destination external hard drive that were not on the source drive. This process took 3 hours and 20 minutes to complete but it freed up a lot of space on the destination drive. I note however that there are still 134 files (I erroneously stated 146 files in my previous thread) on the drive but many of them show "Deleted, Not in source". I assume that the next backup I do will have a lot fewer pages. Is this correct? However I did notice that during the backup the process appeared to be copying a lot of files that I hadn't changed for quite a long time. Is there a way to have the program copy only files which have changed while leaving the other files intact on the destination drive?

Many thanks for your help,

herc

[herc]

That did thee trick and Backup takes much less time.

Thanks for the help,

herc