Diagnosing Slow Backup Jobs
There are many possible reasons why a backup job might be slow.
Internet Bandwidth
Check the speed of your internet connection, fast.com is a popular website that will test your transfer rates. Your upload bandwidth will be the limiting factor in how quickly your can transfer data to your cloud storage vault.
Recent changes
Did the issue suddenly start happening, at a certain time?
New software
Any recently-installed software might change the performance profile of the customer's PC.
On Windows, check in "Programs And Features" and sort by Date to see any recently-installed software
PC performance
Do you have multiple computers experiencing the issue, or just a single PC? This helps determine whether the issue is related to a particular computer or whether the issue is related to the environment.
Antivirus
Many antivirus programs will scan each file as eazyBackup reads them, including but not limited to ESET NOD32 and Windows Defender.
Does it help to exclude eazyBackup
backup-tool.exeprogram in the antivirus software?v19.3.13 and later automatically does this for Windows Defender.
Does the antivirus process show as having high usage in Task Manager when the backup is running?
Use of slow settings
Ensure the "Limit backup to use only 1 disk thread" option is not enabled
Ensure the "speed limit" option is not enabled
Ensure the "Prefer temporary files instead of RAM (slower)" option is not enabled
Toggle the "Rescan unchanged files" option, to see if it increases- or decreases- performance
RAM usage
With large data sets, there are many different data chunks that may be deduplicated against. eazyBackup can use a few GB of RAM to hold all the indexes for deduplication. If the local PC is low on RAM, it may use the swapfile / pagefile, which can significantly reduce performance.
CPU usage
eazyBackup compresses and encrypts all data before upload. On weak CPUs this may cause high CPU usage. The CPU usage may become a bottleneck.
Storage performance
Avoid backing up files from a network share
If you are backing up files from a network location, eazyBackup must make many network roundtrips to access the data. It may be substantially faster to install eazyBackup on the network device instead.
Backup source is a single-queue block device
eazyBackup issues many requests to the source disk in parallel. To avoid negatively affecting other programs on the PC, eazyBackup tries to access the source disk at a low OS priority, but this may be ineffectual if your disk only supports a single queue. You can toggle the "Limit backup to use only 1 disk thread" option to force eazyBackup to make only a disk request to the source disk at a time. This may have a positive effect on other programs on the PC, at the expense of backup job performance.
Use of external harddrives
Is it USB 2 or USB 3?
Some disk drives may experience slow performance. You can use a benchmarking tool to determine the expected performance of the USB drive both in sequential reads, and in small random reads) independently of eazyBackup, as a baseline to compare against eazyBackup's performance.
At the time of writing, CrystalDiskMark is a popular freeware software for measuring disk performance on Windows.
Performance Mode
There is an option in Windows to control whether USB drives are configured for "Quick removal" (default) or "Better performance". Switching to the latter mode can significantly improve performance, but requires you to safely eject the drive. To change this setting:
Open Device Manager > Disk drives > Properties > Policies tab
If the "Quick removal" / "Better performance" radio option is available, ensure it is set to "Better performance"
If the "Enable write caching" checkbox option is available, ensure that it is enabled
Backing up direct to cloud storage
Check the speed of your internet connection
Check the Internet service provider's status page, to ensure they are not currently experiencing any error
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