Long Full Backup Times

[ZacT_1984]

Hello,
I'm trying to figure out why my backups take a long time.  I am backing up 330gigabytes of data at high compression on Windows Small Business Server 2008 with 4 gigs of ram and a 3.0ghz Xeon processor (Hyperthreading) to a USB 2.0 drive.  A full backup in BESR2k10 takes 9 hours.  What would affect the backup time.

[Dinsdale]

Your biggest factor would be the USB drive. We have found that doing backups to USB is rather slow as the max speed is 480Mbit/sec and that does not allow for much overhead.  We have been forced into using a USB 2.0 device in certain situations and speed is an issue.

We have upgraded a couple of devices to use 3Gbps eSATA drives so we have much faster backup times.  The controllers are relatively inexpensive but we did have to try several due to a conflict with the Dell and HP workstations.  We used a dock that accepted two SATA deives for easy swapping.  6gbps SATA seems to be shipping which would be faster still.

While we would prefer a fast tape drive or fast attached stiorage/SAN, that is not always possible