Forum Support/Setup and Configuration
Speed up your backup
Kevin Woods
posted this on November 22, 2010 14:54
Hello Julian,
Glad to have you onboard with SafeCopy but sorry to hear about the slow initial backup.
Yes the initial backup does take a while, but below are a couple things you can do to help:
1) Turn off the AutoThrottle checkbox and set it to Full Speed. This setting is located on the main status windows.
2) Check the Configuration / Settings to see what folders you have selected for backup. If you have My Documents selected, I would recommend you switch to Custom and manually check the folders you want to backup (documents, desktop, pictures, music, etc). That will ensure that no application or temporary files are included for backup. Those types of files sometimes exist for backup with the default My Documents setting and may slow things down considerably.
3) Lastly, just make sure your computer is online all day/night, which it sounds like you are already doing.
Let me know how that goes.
Kevin
The initial backup can take a while depending on how much data you have to backup and the upload speed of your internet. One the initial backup is done, there will be no problem keeping up with the daily changes on your computer.
Below are a couple things you can do to help speed up your initial backup:
- Turn off the AutoThrottle checkbox and set it to Full Speed. This setting is located on the main status window.
- Check the Configuration / Settings to see what folders you have selected for backup. If you have My Documents selected, I would recommend you switch to Custom and manually check the folders you want to backup (documents, desktop, pictures, music, etc). That will ensure that no application or temporary files are included for backup. Those types of files sometimes exist for backup with the default My Documents setting and may slow things down considerably.
- Lastly, just make sure your computer is online all day/night so that there is the maximum amount of time to backup.
Comments
Are there any plans for adding FTP upload or even mailing in a DVD with our data so that the initial backup can be completed faster? Or even having it be multithreaded so that various files can be uploaded at once, instead of one file at a time...)
I have the AutoThrottle turned off and it's set to Full Speed, but it's taking over an hour to upload a 50 MB file. At this speed it will take over a 1000 hours (over 40 days) to upload the rest of my 50 gigs. It's shame my computer at 650 Watts has to be on 24/7 just to upload at this speed.
I have Verizon FIOS, so upload speeds are super fast (~4.5MB/s according to various online speedometer tests, and also tested by myself when uploading to various sites.)
Thanks!
Good suggestions Grayaii. Currently the upload is only through the software and does take a while, although it is typically faster than you described. We do have webDAV access for download and you can use an FTP client that supports webDAV for multithreaded access to downloads.
Sounds like you have a super fast FIOS connection while SafeCopy is upload is geared toward our typical users with much slower connections where we will not saturate their upload speeds.
I'm experiencing the same problem: only 72Mb per hour on average. This way it will take 1500 hours to backup the full 105Gb. And I'm not counting my second PC with also 70Gb. Kevin you talk about webDAV and FTP and multihreaded access. How does this work and what do I have to do to get this working, if only for the intital backup.
I think SafeCopy is a great way of on-lin backing up my files and also quit afordable, but oh s-o s--l--o--w, please help us out!!
I think webDav is only to download your files, not upload. (To tell you the truth, I haven't used it to try uploading so I may be wrong...). Plus, even if it did assist in uploading, I wouldn't know which files are NOT uploaded. I used the BitKinex client to use webDav (free download).
Maybe a possible solution would be to have SafeCopy allow certain customers "windows of time" where they get higher upload speeds, at least to get the first backup all uploaded. Or maybe allow certain customers to have full FTP for a window of time.
That's just me thinking outloud :)
Great comments. Keep em coming. The webDAV access is read only, so any uploads need to happen through the SafeCopy software. This is because the software encrypts prior to upload, checks for duplicate files, maintains versions and index the files names all in one step during upload.
My personal preference for webDAV download on a Mac is Transmit as it supports webDAV. Check your favorite FTP client and likely it will support it as well.
We're working on some different ways to handle the upload speed. Thanks for your patience on this.
I think something has changed since last I checked because now I'm getting higher upload speeds. I left it run over night (~8 hours) and it uploaded exactly 1306.2 MB. (I got this number by selecting the file at the top of the list, and then seeing how far it went down overnight.) Is this an average speed? Another factor could be that I moved from Boston to Raleigh. Similar to Filezilla, it would be awesome if there was an option to specify how many upload threads you want running simultaneously :)