On Christmas day, I posted about some problems I had getting this computer switched over to the SSD that we'd (in theory) gifted each other. I never posted the follow-up, which was that on Friday, I was able to get it to boot off the SSD, but that always gave me the dual boot option (SSD or HD). That took the Windows7 System Repair Disk option in Windoze Backup/Restore. I was finally able to find some shareware (EasyBCD 2.2) that allowed me to fix that so that it will only boot off the SSD without pausing for the dual boot option and it has booted successfully off the SSD ever since. The story is a little longer and more full of "blood, tears, toil and sweat", as Churchill said, but the bottom line is everything was working fine by Friday night.
So all's swell that ends swell, right?
The other thing we thought we'd do for ourselves is to get a backup system that both of us could use. For the last several years, I've used a Western Digital 1 Terabyte backup but it would only allow one user. The term is "Network Attached Storage", or NAS, as an alternative to one of those cloud-based, pay by the Gigabyte services. Based on a few reviews like this one, I got one of these Western Digital "MyCloud" boxes for the house.
There's another long, bloody story here, but does anyone have experience with these NAS backups? In particular, how long should it take for the first backup? I'm backing up my small SSD (about 60 GB) and my "File Hog" of data, pictures, documents and so on, that's about 140 GB. The backup utility has been running continually since 5:30 PM on 12/31, so almost two complete days, and is only at 86% done. I'm hoping it will finish before I'd like to shut down tonight. I know that with an incremental backup scheme, it should go faster from here on, but my incremental backups with the old one took about half an hour, over USB2. Any guesses on how long it should take, over Ethernet?
And my second info bleg relates to Blogger itself. I moved all my Firefox bookmarks and the associated crap browsers gather over to the old file hog, leaving only the executable on the SSD. Previously it was all one drive. Since then, that tag in the upper right for blogger always wants me to sign in. It says "Create Blog" and "Sign In" instead of having my blogger/Gmail ID there. When I sign in, it already knows I'm signed in, and when I comment on other blogs, it knows I'm signed in. It just never allows me to access the other options on my computer. It works on the iPad, though, so I know it's just this machine.
Anyone ever seen this?
Regarding the slow speed of your backup over ethernet, you might have a bad cable or end, that drops your speed or puts you in half duplex. I've had that happen before.
ReplyDeleteThe other issue might simply be win7, as it has a notoriously slow copy. I use terracopy and it is FAST. I've been using it for a couple of years and haven't had any problems. I like driveimage for backups, as I can do a full image of the drive and still get into the individual files later. It's not a 'backup' utility per se be is great for capturing the state of your machine at different points (like after you have everything installed and configured, but before mucking it up with data and use.)
I also use Microsoft's Synctoy with the "contribute" option to move and consolidate old folders into new. It's a good way to avoid duplicates while consolidating folders from previous migrations.
Windirstat will give you a graphical look at your drive and makes it easy to find space hogs.
If you used the image resizer powertoy from Microsoft, you will want to get the new (non-MS) version that works with win7. It will give you back the ability to right click an image and resize. VERY convenient. Worked flawlessly for me for the last year or two.
Hope that helps,
zuk
Check your personal network for an old hub/switch/router which may be acting as a bottleneck, such as a 10 base T hub or even a 100 base T hub or switch. Those will slow transfer significantly.
ReplyDeleteI also concur on checking for possible bottlenecks and your cables. A decent gigabit switch should run you about $30-40 or less.
ReplyDeleteThose fixes alone should speed things up a little quicker, but I would suggest using a 3rd party backup software to go to your NAS.