BE slow incremental backup

[softdes]

Hello all,

I have BE 8.5.3 installed on two laptops. Both run Vista Ultimate SP2. One (Inspiron 9300) has an 160 GB IDE drive, the other (Vostro 1720) has a 320 Gb SATA drive.

When I run an incremental backup on the laptop that has the IDE drive, the incremental backup completes in 3 minutes or so.  But when I run it on the one w/ a SATA drive, the incremental backup takes 40 minutes. The amount of data written to the USB drives (WD Passports) connected to the machines is the same. Even if I run successive incremental backups on the 1720, the amount of time to generate the backup stays the same, around 40 minutes.

One thing I noticed is the message displayed by BE SR on the 1720 - Comparing changes against file <path to backup file>. This takes almost all of the 40 minutes... Once that message goes away, the image is generated pretty quickly.

On the 9300 I don't see that message, and the backup runs in 2-3 minutes.

Any ideas or suggestions on what could be causing this 10 fold increase in backup time?

Thanks

 

[Andreas_Horlach]

If you run another incremental immediately after the long 40 minutes incremental completes, does it take the same amount of time? To do this, allow the initial job to complete, open BESR, and manually start the job. Watch the time and report that back.

[softdes]

Andreas,

I did as you requested. Besides the "Comparing..."  messsage, I also saw the " Reconciling volume" message, so I wonder if I am not seeing the problem described in http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/301012.htm.

After the backup finished, I ran another incremental, and this time I did not see the message, and the incremental backup ran just fine (i.e., in a few minutes). The times for the two successive incremental backup jobs are below:

6/18/2009 17:16:37 PM Medium Priority Notice: Info 6C8F0427: Backup Exec System Recovery service started successfully. 0x00 (Backup Exec System Recovery)
6/18/2009 17:21:20 PM High Priority Notice: Info 6C8F1F63: The drive-based backup job, Drive Backup of (C:\), has been started manually. 0x00 (Backup Exec System Recovery)
6/18/2009 18:02:58 PM High Priority Notice: Info 6C8F1F7A: A manual incremental recovery point of drive C:\ was created successfully. 0x00 (Backup Exec System Recovery)
6/18/2009 18:06:08 PM High Priority Notice: Info 6C8F1F63: The drive-based backup job, Drive Backup of (C:\), has been started manually. 0x00 (Backup Exec System Recovery)
6/18/2009 18:07:01 PM High Priority Notice: Info 6C8F1F7A: A manual incremental recovery point of drive C:\ was created successfully. 0x00 (Backup Exec System Recovery)

So it appears that every time I boot up the machine the incremental backup job will reconcile the volume. How can I confirm if it is indeed an issue with SYMSNAP stopping w/o being able to save the changes to the hard drive as described in document 301012? If I manually stop the service will it write the changed sectors to the table? If so, where is the table so that I can verify the file date, to see if it has been updated before the machine was rebooted?

Also, can I add some dependency to the service so it is stopped gracefully sooner than it is now, so that it has time to write the sector changes to the table?

Thanks

[Andreas_Horlach]

You might want to check the 'Backup Exec System Recovery' service and ensure that it is using the local system account. Also, to ensure that the service is in fact not making a graceful shutdown, to test, leave the computer up and running for a couple of backup cycles to confirm that the driver is indeed the issue. Once we can narrow it down to that (in addition to the testing you've already done), we can focus on why it is not shutting down properly. This issue seems to be more common with Vista.

[softdes]

Andreas,

I ran 2 backups w/o powering down the machine between jobs. They executed in a few minutes, as expected of incremental backups.

After restarting the machine, a new incremental took over 30 minutes.

So it does seem to be the driver that is not shutting down properly. And yes, it is running as Local system.

Any suggestions? 

Thanks.