Troubleshooting System backup suddenly is inexplicably long

[Mohan Rajan]

my system backup used to take 10 mins and suddenly it has started showing 3 hours since last few days and i have had to cancel the backup.

 

[Svoll]

Have you tried running so cleanup utility apps like ccleaner to get rid of temp and unnecessary files? Any new programs install that might increase your image or backup size. My favorite has always been to cleanup the WinSys folder using DISM after running windows diskcleaner.

Dism.exe /online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup <--- usually takes about 10-20 minutes while it cleans up the image, you can also use DISM to restore your dism image if it needed repairing.

Give it a try and see if the backup time improves. Best of Luck and Happy Holidays!

 

[shmu26]

what software do you use for backup? temp files are skipped by most backup solutions, so I don't think that's it. Sounds to me like the backup software got corrupted. Try reinstalling it, or better yet, do an experiment with a different backup software.

 

[Tabeer]

Very commonly this happens when a hard drive reverts to PIO mode after Windows decides it has seen a few errors from the drive. You can verify this by looking at the properties of the IDE Controller to which the drive is connected in device manager. (IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers/Primary IDE Channel/Advanced Settings tab, for example).

 

[Mohan Rajan]

checked performance of a second backup application "Image for windows" and same issue.
checked all suggestions above and same issue.
checked fragmentation. no luck
Updated all drivers using Drivebooster free . same problem
checked backup to a different hdd and same problem.
couldn't be system disk as the system is fast to boot and operate.
finally deleted all backup jobs created in macrium reflect and recreated new jobs. Bingo back to 10 minutes again
the issue was probably caused by my swapping a usb disk for another and this must have resulted in windows reporting invorrect drive letters to the backup application.
thanks for the support guys.
case closed.

 

[shmu26]

thanks for reporting back about the problem, glad to hear it was solved!