Other Norton Products

[DaveH]

I finally got a chance to try some backups and figure out the speed of the data transfer and I was a little shocked at how slow it really is.

Brian, when you said your image creation rate was slower than your USB2 write speed, I was thinking that it must have been close.  But my results, at least on my system are not even close.

I'm using a fairly clean windows 7 pro 32bit  installation.  I'm using it to test the NIS 2012 version so I don't have many programs installed.  So my windows partition is only 12.2GB, lets call it 12,492.28MB.

Running Ghost in windows I made an image to a second partition on the same drive and it took 724 seconds for 5038.08MB using standard compression.  That makes the transfer rate only 6.96MB/Sec

That totally sucks, I figured the problem must have been because both partitions are on the same drive.

I booted to the recovery disk and did a cold image using standard compression, same source and destination as my hot image and ended up with a 5140.48MB image that took 551 seconds  for a rate of 9.33MB/Sec

Note the cold image is larger because it includes the NIS definition files that are normally excluded from a hot image, also note that it was approx 25% faster  9min 11sec versus 12min 4sec

Then I repeated the images onto my external drive figuring it will be faster since I'm not reading and writing to the same drive.

Hot image in windows made a 5027MB image in 487 seconds for a rate of 10.32MB/Sec

You can see it was faster than reading and writing to the same drive but it was still less than half my maximum USB2 transfer speed.

The same thing done as a cold image was 5130.24MB image in 314 seconds for a rate of 16.34MB/Sec

Thats the fastest of all but still only around 70% of my USB2 transfer speed.

One interesting find was that repeating the last test with medium compression instead of standard compression only took a total of 6 seconds longer and the image ended up 389MB smaller.  Thats approx 8% smaller for an extra 6 seconds.

Dave

[Brian_K]

Dave,

I've never measured the transfer speed to a USB external HD from Ghost. I have measured the speed from one HD to another internal HD.

Standard compression was 21 MB/sec

No compression was 95 MB/sec

I didn't record the image sizes but the times were 220 and 82 seconds respectively. So the calculated image sizes were 4620 MB and 7790 MB.

[Brian_K]

Wolfy,

We are dying to know how you resolved this issue. It is very interesting.

[Wolfy]

There is noting for me to resolve. I stated a simple fact that installing IE9 into Vista OS resulted in my restore point creation and transfer to USB external drive much faster than usual.  Ghost's clock time gave me a little over two minutes to transfer about 130 GB of data, which includes multi-media files.  I'm using a H-P Pavillion, 2.54 Ghz, 4 GB ram, with duel-core microprocessors.  I do turn off NIS when I do backups.  Other than that, there's not much else I do.

[redk9258]

This could only be an incremental backup. Try a one time backup and I'll bet it takes much longer.

[Wolfy]

No, it was a full backup as I had deleted all previous backups from my external drive.  I intended to do a full backup after installling IE9 and had problems with incremental backups hanging up at 1% due to excessive time in acquiring data. This is a known Ghost problem with large incrementals.  So, when I did perform my full backup as saw how fast it ran, I could only think that hardware accelerators were installed by IE9.  I'm not an engineer, but I did run this by the Norton techs.  The filesize of this total backup was not smaller than previous total backups so I have no reason to suspect an incremental, as the external drive didn't contain any total backups to trigger an incremental.  I do understand from chatting with Norton that they are investigating this sudden accleration in the normally sloth Ghost.