Using IFW to Back Up Over Network

[RogueTrader]

I use IFW to back my computer up nightly, and use an eSATA connection to an external drive. It takes perhaps two hours (less for incremental) to finish.

Now, I have occasion to use a network setup. As a test, I am using my gigabit ethernet home network to get familiar with the process.

The process worked, but I was a bit dismayed by how long it took - around 6 hours, which gets me into unmanageable territory for my intended application. The network was reporting 2-3 MB/sec speed.

Should I be able to achieve a better speed than this? I'd appreciate any pointers on what to look at to verify I have an optimal setup/procedure.

Thanks all!

[TeraByte Support]

You'd want to start with your network in general to ensure you have good
speeds. transfer very large files.

Then you can play with some the /po settings (seem manual) or /iobs settings
to see if there is a difference.


"RogueTrader" wrote in message news:10620@public.image...

I use IFW to back my computer up nightly, and use an eSATA connection to an
external drive. It takes perhaps two hours (less for incremental) to
finish.

Now, I have occasion to use a network setup. As a test, I am using my
gigabit ethernet home network to get familiar with the process.

The process worked, but I was a bit dismayed by how long it took - around 6
hours, which gets me into unmanageable territory for my intended
application. The network was reporting 2-3 MB/sec speed.

Should I be able to achieve a better speed than this? I'd appreciate any
pointers on what to look at to verify I have an optimal setup/procedure.

Thanks all!

[merckxist]

Just tested a full backup of an 8Gb "recover" partition on a Win 7 box that ran over a gigabit network to a NAS appliance that completed in just over 2 minutes. Windows Task Manager/Resouce Monitor showed network traffic at 500-600 Mbps while the backup was running.

You didn't describe the environment in any detail so its hard to say where the bottleneck may be happening, but it should be possible to get better performance than you have experienced. In this test scenario, the NAS is a standalone 2 TB hard drive running a Linux OS providing network shares via Samba (I think). I used IFW GUI with default options to run the test, no other optimization or de-optimization (like verification) techniques attempted. Assuming the eSATA external drive is local and the performance is acceptable, I would focus on the network link and the NAS drive. Does the NAS network interface run at gigabit? Is the NAS unit a hard drive as opposed to a USB device?

[RogueTrader]

Thanks to all for the comments. I looked hard at all aspects of my network, and found I had to tweak some settings, as well has get a gigabit router (I also looked at jumbo frames, but in a network forum, it was said that's really not needed these days). After these changes, the backup image (with no I/O enhancements) was running at 21MB/sec, which makes the speed comparable to imaging to a local eSATA drive. This is acceptable for my real-world scenario, although faster is always better.

Merckxist, the network on a straight copy job of a large file runs at about 200MB/sec (this is PC to PC, I don't have a NAS). My real-world scenario will probably have a NAS, however; I have not selected that as yet. Any recommendations would be appreciated. Cost is a factor, so high-end solutions are probably not in the cards.

[merckxist]

I can't speak to the wide variety of NAS products available on the market; I have only used the Western Digital MyCloud (2 Gb variant ~ $130) on my network. I am satisfied with its performance, but I am only using its basic features. I provide a share (one each) to three windows systems that live on the network. I use these shares as the destination drive for the IFW backup. I also use the feature that can manage a recovery share on a locally (to the SAN) connected USB device (hard drive in my case) to keep a synchronized image of selected share data. This is strictly a point-in-time snapshot in case the SAN itself is lost, so I keep historical IFW backups on the shares themselves and periodically remove aged-out TBI files from the share. WD provides a User forum you can view w/o registering if you want to see what kinds of issues that users are having with other features or configurations. When I've used it in the past, it seemed to be actively moderated and users were quite responsive with suggestions/solutions. I have no first-hand experience with other vendors in this category of NAS equipment so I can't say which might be better or worse.
There are, of course, many other network solutions. The single hard drive, dedicated O/S NAS is not too high on the price/capacity scale and it gives reasonable performance for average home systems. The only small scale option that might be cheaper is using a router that provides a USB port that can be shared to other computers on the network. I would expect the performance to be slower than with a device that uses Ethernet directly. Going in the other direction would be multi-disk hardware that provides RAID performance, capacity and redundancy, but I've never needed, nor could justify the expense, of those solutions. If you need that capacity/performance, though, its available.
**edit** 12/22/15
Thinking about the router/USB option; I recently replaced my router due to old firmware w/potential security issue and the new unit has a USB 3 port so I ordered a new flash drive and will test the same backup I used w/NAS and see what happens. Couldn't find the one I wanted locally and shipping will take about a week so it will be a while to get those results.
**edit** 12/27/15
Got the USB 3.0 flash drive a bit sooner than expected, its rated at "up to" 50 MB/s write speed. Running the same backup I used to test the hard drive NAS, I got 100-200 Mbps on the Windows Task Manager/Resource Monitor for network utilization and the job ran for about 8 minutes. The flash drive was connected via USB 3 port on a gigabit router. The same Win 7 box was used to run IFW over gigabit ethernet. So approximately 3 to 1 advantage to the hard drive over the USB 3 backup method in a network environment. No scientific claims intended, just a one-off experiment; YMMV.

[RogueTrader]

Let us know how that goes. Sounds interesting for some applications. I've been doing more research on the whole NAS concept, and it may be more than I want to get into, both from an expense and learning curve standpoint. Someday, maybe when I have more time to devote to it.

My instant application I need more quickly, and I am thinking a Windows share over the network will serve for this SOHO application. I may just repurpose one of my PC's from the boneyard, and load it with the number of disks sufficient for the task. I was looking at Freenas and NAS4free, but that's where the learning curve got so steep.