Save & Restore performance slider

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The provision of the Performance Slider suggests one can keep working while a full backup is working so what happens to emails, documents etc that one produces after the programme has gone past that particular point? I always leave the machine alone, producing nothing while the backup is in progress. Am I missing something?

Thank you for your reply Erik,

 

So your advice would be NOT to continue working whilst a backup image is in progress. If so, why is the performance slider there? Does Save & Restore V 2.0 have the same drawback?

Some people wish to continue to use the computer without a performance impact.  Some examples are gaming and internet browsing.  If you want to ensure 100% up to date, then the recommendation would definitely to run the backup while not using the computer at all. 

On the contrary.  The reason for the Performance slider is to allow the user to dynamically set a cap on how much of the CPU that Ghost can use while a backup is going on.  This was done specifically to allow the user to continue working while a backup is occurring. 

 

Everyone wants a backup to be as quick as possible.  We can snag a copy of your hard drive many times faster than you can blink.  This is called a snapshot.  However, the problem is in getting the snapshot data off to another location.  The speed of this part of the process varies greatly depending on things like the speed of your drive, the speed of the destination, the speed of the link to the destination, the level of compression that a user selects, etc.  It is the compression of the image that causes the bulk of Ghost's CPU use.  If this were let run unchecked, compressing the data into the backup image would completely take over the CPU and there by keeping the user from doing anything at all.  So, a performance slider was added so that the user could control Ghost's maximum CPU use. 

 

We can not tell if our compressing an image is taking too much of the CPU so that the user's other programs run too slow to be useful because we really don't know what the users other programs have to do in order to make the next thing happen on screen.  Plus the CPU in each computer is different with some being more capable than others.  Because of these things, we can't just pick a max CPU use that would work in a variety of situations unless we pick a really low number which would make everyone's backups take forever.  With current technology, only the user can determine when we are using too much CPU and it is slowing everything else down to the point of being unusable.

 

To use the slider, if your system slows down too much during a backup, drag the slider towards slow.  If the backup is taking too long and it does not appear to be slowing things down too much, drag the slider towards fast.  The level that you end up with depends on your work habits, the apps you run, and the capabilities of your hardware.

 

You can think of Save and Restore as the smaller sibling to Ghost which in turn is a smaller sibling to BESR (Backup Exec System Recovery).  Their methods of operation are basically the same.


erik_carlstrom wrote:
Some people wish to continue to use the computer without a performance impact.  Some examples are gaming and internet browsing.  If you want to ensure 100% up to date, then the recommendation would definitely to run the backup while not using the computer at all. 

Or do Recovery Point Sets with the interval between incrementals set to something small.  You can set the interval a short as every 15 minutes.  However, if you do have frequent incrementals, I would strongly suggest you enable consolidation.

Think of it like a snapshot.  If changes are made after that, then it will not have those changes.  The file and folder backup does try to reconcile changes on the fly, but of course this is limited.  Definitely recommend regular backups.