backup never finish?Submitted by ottosykora on April 28, 2008 - 6:51am
I tried few times already to create an backup of my stick using the backup utility of the PA. OK, it starts, the cmd window shows some files in some arbitrary order to be backed up, but the job never finishes. It produces a pregress bar, OK, but this is somewhere in the region of 90 percent and will not move further. The harddrive works all the time, after abt 30hrs I have given up that experiment. The stick is 8gb, has some 5gb data on it. am I doing something wrong or does this in general work this way? ( categories: )
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Wwell...
Does the cmd window show any error?
Thats what the cmd window is for - get more info if you want/need it.
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
no error
>Does the cmd window show any error?<
negative, no error shown, just it looks like it works all, the lines state some files in apparently arbitrary order being backed up and mostly 3% at the and, then it sometimes changes to the next line etc.
The blue progression bar is at abt 90 percent of the size, hard rive of the computer works like hell, after a weekend leaving it so already twice, I have given up trying, fear my harddrive will not survive a week of backing up this stick.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
Size does matter
You talked about 5GB data, right? Do you try to create a full backup, documents or just settings?
If you dealing with the full backup option, compressing 5GB data could take a serious, really serious amount of time.
Do you creating a backup to an NTFS or FAT32 formatted drive? If the drive is FAT32, there's a possibility that the backup file will be larger than 4GB - FAT32 limit. Maybe 7zip can't handle this case correctly.
Anyway, I suggest you to copy first the contents of the drive to your harddrive, than compress it and see what happens.
right, but
tried both, fat32 and ntfs , knowing that the 4gb could cause problems in fat32. In both cases all behaves similar.
OK, normaly , I do just a copy of the stick to may back up drive, all works so well too.
Unfortunately, most backup software otherwise used under windows will refuse to make backup of portable drive, even acronis 11 can write images to a stick, but will refuse to make backup of a stick.(bootdisk-Linux)
Only acronis run under windows was able to make a backup, this ended in a file of some 3.3gb size when using maximum compression there and took abt 2.5hrs to suck it out of the stick.
So this is why I was so surpised, that the backup here did not work too much.
I will try to make backup from parts of the stick only next time and see what happends. If the speed is such slow, then the use of this backup is somewhat theoretical in todays sizes of sticks.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
7-Zip
As far as I know, PA Backup using 7-Zip to compress the backup. 7-Zip is not really fast, even when you use the maximum compression option, and using a lot of memory.
I would use the backup utility only for the application settings.
Just for sure, I'm syncing with my home/work computer on a daily base. About once a month, I burn the whole stuff to a DVD (burn & forget forever :)).