Christopher Greaves

416-621-9348 cgreaves@chrisgreaves.com
Home Services Products

Encryption And Off-site Backup Storage (Home) ; Overview ; The Problem ; The Essence Of The Solution ; How Long Does It Take To Do A Backup? ; Assumptions ; Breakdown Of Tasks ; The Stand-Alone Solution ; The Networked Solution ; Let’s Get Started ; Mounting The Backup Drive ; Mounting An Encrypted Drive ; Waiting For The Backup Drive ; Processing Each Local Drive ; RoboCopy New And Later Files ; RoboCopy Parameter Files ; Append Session Details To A Log File ; Shutting Down the Computer ; Review For Local Systems ; Putting Together The Local Backup System ; SUBSTituting A Drive For A Folder ; Assembling The Batch File ; ( TITLE commands ); Running The Backup Batch File ; Examining Our Results ; Waiting For A Set Of Drives ; Issue the Backup Command To A Set Of Drives ; Modifying The Driving Batch File ; What About The Log File? ; The Upgraded Set Of Batch Files ; Encryption of backup data ; What Is Involved In Encrypting A Backup Device? ; ( Advice On Passwords ); What Is Involved In Mounting An Encrypted Device? ; User Mounted Or Automated? ; Using A DOS Batch File To Facilitate Mounting ; Using A DOS Batch File To Facilitate Dismounts ; Making The External Drives Available Across The Network ; Mounting A Shared Drive For Sharing ; Installing On A Networked Computer ; Running On The Big Beige Box ; An Improved Method Of Waiting ; Shutdown Or Restart? ; At Long Last! A Working Version! ; The Backup.BAT file ; The Mount.BAT file ; The ProcessDrive.BAT file ; The Shutdown.BAT File ; The Encryption Process

Toronto and Mississauga, Friday, December 03, 2010 8:31 AM

How Long Does It Take To Do A Backup?

Of course “Quantities may vary”, but for want of a better benchmark, I just ran a complete backup from my 100GB laptop computer to two external USB drives, by clicking an icon on my desktop,

My billing package reported:

8:58 AM 10/14/2008 maint backups
9:06 AM 10/14/2008

So a full run to TWO external drives took about 8 minutes.

The first time you run the backup, it will take hours, because your external drives will be empty, and the backup process will copy everything across just one time.

Thereafter, your backup runs will take anything up to 15 minutes.

That’s short enough so that you could start them running, and by the time you’ve rinsed out the coffee pot and checked that the windows are locked, the backup run will be complete and you could remove the devices and take them off-site.

Remember too, as in my case, the Laptop computer is only two years old (2GB RAM, 2GHz, fast hard drive) whereas the Big Beige Box is about ten years old (695MHz, 320MB RAM), and a rather slow old IDE drive. On top of that it has to transfer data across the network)

Assumptions

Toronto and Mississauga, Friday, December 03, 2010 8:31 AM