backing up to external drive

builder22 · 1 Nov 2019 at 23:01

finally bought a Seagate 2TB drive to back up the data on my ~12 year old 500GB drive after seeing it disappear from file explorer a few times earlier this week

just did a left click 'copy here' of the entire drive to the new external drive (333GB of almost 500GB left after 3hrs)

it's fluctuating from anything between '8h left' to 'more than 1 day', presumably because of file types

would it be best to leave the PC on for as long as it takes or shut down overnight and restart in the morning? I'm assuming it would have coped all the files so far and won't have as much to do after a power cycle?

The PC is 'ancient' E8400 cpu, IP 35 pro board, 8800GTS512 card...

brendy · 1 Nov 2019 at 23:10

Leave it on and let it run or use something like sync toys 2 which should show you progress plus make future copies faster.

builder22 · 1 Nov 2019 at 23:20

ok thanks, does sync toys 2 give a more accurate idea of overall time left? rather than the standard win10 estimate (which is up and down)

Donnie Fisher · 2 Nov 2019 at 06:44

So many variables affect the sustained transfer rate. Lots of smaller files noticeably reduce the average speed as well. So will fragmentation of files etc etc.

Is it usb2 on the computer? If so, youll at best be able to transfer at around 30MB/s ... For 500GB of data, at it's very best that would take 4.6hours. so anything affecting it will only increase that time noticeably.

Windows seems to look at how much data is left, how fast it's currently going and then works out how long that will take at it's its current rate... That length of time will always vary when the transfer rate varies as described above.

I'd just leave it and let it run. If you stop half way, the system still has to compare what it's already transferred so it thrashes through all the file again for a second time.