Best way to backup your Hyperspin HDD(s)

[epayson85]

I built a small windows home server with 18tb of drive space.  It backs up my media server and my arcade using cloud berry backup.  The server also images the operating system drives in case those ever fail while monitoring all drives on my network via SMART.  Then I also upload everything to the cloud using crashplan.  17Tb up on the cloud so far. The backup server actually remains turned off but is directed when to turn on via the media server with this awesome program called lights out.  Since I don't change everything as often on the arcade I just do that backup manually and turn on the backup server after I have done anything.

[epayson85]

Well, 28 effing hours into it's full Win 7 backup it failed. After 28 hours it was only at 54%.

Apparently the external Seagate HDD had an I/O blip and disconnected which stopped the entire process. It gave me the option to continue, but picking that started it over from the beginning. I'm about to take this Seagate drive outside and light it on fire.

Can anyone explain to me the difference between an actual backup and just dragging/dropping files like Mystul does? A search isn't really answering that question for me. Why does a backup take 24+ hours and not even be close to done, when if I drag n drop those folders they all transfer in 1/10th the amount of time?

 

Don't drag and drop files.  Windows explorer is notorious for slowdown issues especially with large files and large amounts of files. The small roms and small images are going to kill your transfer speeds.

 

http://lifehacker.com/5280976/five-best-alternative-file-copiers

 

I have personally used teracopy pro and I absolutely love it.  I did 6Tb in an afternoon on 5400 rpm drives.