Any idea why those files took so long?

[joeyoung]

This backkup job is to backup individual files on the same server. They are on the J: Drive and H: Drive. On both of these two dirves, there are about the same number of directories and  same number of files. The J: drive have about 800G files and H: drive has about 6 G files. You can see each file on the J: drive is much bigger than the file on H:  drive.

It took 4 hours to backup the J: drive's 800G files. And it took 4 hours to bakcup the H: dirve's 6 G files too.

My qeustion is why it took so long to backup the 6G files on the H: drive?

thanks a lot

Joe

[CraigV · Accepted solution]

How many files on each drive?
If there were millions of files on your H:\ drive, the drive doesn't get to a point where it is writing at a constant speed. That is why file backups tend to be slower than backing up something like Exchange.
I have included a link to a Symantec tech article that can explain it in more detail...

http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/231488.htm

[Ken_Putnam]

A large number of small files will always backup slower than fewer larger files totallng the same byte count due to the overhead to open and close each file

[joeyoung]

Thanks a lot, Craig and Ken. You are righ. There are 13,837,350 small files in 15630 directories.  Any tricks to speed up for those small files?

[CraigV]

You could probably look into backing up to disk first, and then streaming off to tape. This will backup to *.bkf files of a size you set. THese would be big enough to stream off to tape at a constant stream.