I'm backing up my Microserver running WSE 2016 to an external USB 3 HDD. Around 6 TB of data. And it takes days. Task Manager indicates plenty of RAM (I have 16 GB) and that the CPU is at 5%. USB 3.0 has plenty of bandwidth. So why is it taking so long? The only extra software I have in Malwarebytes but eliminating that makes no difference. The HDDs are in RAID 1.
Why is my Windows Server Essentials 2016 backup so slow?
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Monitor the read/write speed for the external disk using task manager during the backup process - is it by any chance both reading and writing a lot of data, when you might expect it only to be doing a lot of writing?
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Just as I suspected. I haven't used WSE 2016, but I've observed the same behaviour from the built in backup systems under both Windows 7 and Windows 10. In my case the backup is to an internal SATA HDD rather than a USB one, and I observed read/write speeds of about 35 MB/sec simultaneously.
Now this is speculation on my part, but how I think it's working is:
Windows is doing an incremental backup over an existing one, to store only the changes rather than copying everything again. Something about the way they have coded this means it's having to read the entire content of the existing backup as it goes along. It does that at the same time as writing the new data.
As you likely already know, reading/writing a mechanical hard drive simultaneously kills the performance, due to the need to keep seeking back and forth. The resulting data transfer rates are considerably slower than if you did all the reading then all the writing one at a time.
How I've worked around this on my system is simply to delete the existing backup when about to run the backup routine. Then I've observed Windows writing data to the target disk, without any significant reading, and it writes at the maximum speed the disk can handle. Even though this means it has to copy everything to the backup instead of just changes since the last one, it still finishes a lot faster than the incremental backup would due to the huge speed difference.
So - maybe give that a try on your system too, see if you observe the same results. If you do, either start doing what I do and delete the existing backup when about to run the new one, or get some backup software that's better than the stuff built into Windows itself.
Now this is speculation on my part, but how I think it's working is:
Windows is doing an incremental backup over an existing one, to store only the changes rather than copying everything again. Something about the way they have coded this means it's having to read the entire content of the existing backup as it goes along. It does that at the same time as writing the new data.
As you likely already know, reading/writing a mechanical hard drive simultaneously kills the performance, due to the need to keep seeking back and forth. The resulting data transfer rates are considerably slower than if you did all the reading then all the writing one at a time.
How I've worked around this on my system is simply to delete the existing backup when about to run the backup routine. Then I've observed Windows writing data to the target disk, without any significant reading, and it writes at the maximum speed the disk can handle. Even though this means it has to copy everything to the backup instead of just changes since the last one, it still finishes a lot faster than the incremental backup would due to the huge speed difference.
So - maybe give that a try on your system too, see if you observe the same results. If you do, either start doing what I do and delete the existing backup when about to run the new one, or get some backup software that's better than the stuff built into Windows itself.