Transfer rate dropping to a crawl during back up

[discusfan]

Maybe you guys can help me. I have been struggling with this for awhile now. I have a Tandberg 8 station RDX I SCSI, If I start with a fresh boot up of the server, and manually start a back up, the transfer rate is about 2,374 mb/s, which is what Tandberg says is normal. But most of the time when a scheduled back up starts after the office is closed, I will come in the next morning and the back up is still running, but at 20 mb/s. If I cancel the job and try it manually, it stays at that speed, until I reboot the server. I have had Dell go through the server and had Veritas go through Backup Exec. Nothing in the event viewer, and no other programs are affected, you can manually copy files just fine. Any Ideas???????

[Larry_Fine]

Is it backing up the Windows System State when the slowdown occurs?  System State backup is much slower that backup of larger files.

[discusfan]

Yes, I am. Should that be a seperate job? For recovery purposes? Thing is sometimes I can get a good backup 2 days in a row.

[Larry_Fine]

You may want to make your system backup job as lean as possible, just enough for recovery purposes.  Then have a different backup that protects all your extra files and things like that.  This lets you optimize job settings & timings.  If you are limited to how much you can push to the Tandberg at once, you may want to run the system backup (including system state), to a local disk target first, then duplicate that backup to the Tandberg outside of your normal backup window.