Topic: Backup to desktop speed?

[Rob Hillis]

Even now that I've got the tape drive going, I still do the occasional backup to desktop - usually if I'm playing with the contents of an ibay, and want an instant backup.  However, I've got one question regarding the speed I should expect to get from this kind of backup...

My E-Smith machine is a PIII-667mhz, with an old-ish 1G HDD (although the results were the same with an ATA-66 10G drive I was testing with)  The internel network card is a CNet 10/100 card, with the external being a 10mb Realtek.

Backing up to desktop yeilds a maximum of 900kb/s, averaging around 6/700kb/s.  For a 100mb/s connection to the server, this seems a little slow, and I was wondering what transfer rate other people were getting with their backups...

[stephen noble]

> My E-Smith machine is a PIII-667mhz, with an old-ish 1G HDD
> 10/100 card, with the external being a 10mb Realtek.
>
> Backing up to desktop yeilds a maximum of 900kb/s, averaging
> around 6/700kb/s.  For a 100mb/s connection to the server,
> this seems a little slow,

sh*t i thought there was something wrong with my setup

i get 75kb/s through a 10mb hub
i bought a  crossover cable and between two 100mb cards only got 150kb/s
i'm using a vmware server now and it seemed quicker but i didn't study the speed

stephen

[Graeme Robinson]

>Backing up to desktop yeilds a maximum of 900kb/s, averaging around >6/700kb/s. For a 100mb/s connection to the server, this seems a little slow, and I> was wondering what transfer rate other people were getting with their >backups...

actually that seems about right to me, even quite good performance - your ethernet card will have a maximum bus transfer speed of around 860kbps.

The guy with 25kbps is suffering from poor performance tho.

The main advantage of 10mb nets over 100 is an absence of lag when the network traffic increases, not maximum download speed.

[Graeme Robinson]

I should add that for Stephen's benefit, on my 10mb network I get download speeds during deskto backup of around 190kbps.

[Rob Hillis]

Graeme Robinson wrote:

> I should add that for Stephen's benefit, on my 10mb network I
> get download speeds during deskto backup of around 190kbps.

I'll stop complaining then...  Even with the 10mb card in the server, I still get around 500k/bs...

[Alejandro]

I'm thinking something could be wrong,

My internal lan is a 100mb/s with a 3com office connect dual speed switch, (nics realtek)
the average transfer rate WAS about 215kbps, and SEEMED to be matching (with switch improvement) Stephen's crossover connection.
I use past cause when I run the backup first time, used win98 and ms internet explorer ( )  but second time I used netscape 6
with a transfer rate of 150 kbps and then i restart my pc but with linux mandrake and netscape 4.5 and i got a transfer rate of 90 kbps, so i decided to test again with windows 98 and IE and got 75 kbps, what about that....?
 
Each backup procces was done without any file addition to the server, so I think that something is wrong......
And  also the size reported by e-smith manager is about 100mb bigger than the real backup size (140mb aprox)
always using same pc and connection and always a backup to desktop pc (hard disk) and overriding the previous file and no additional trafic with the server cause is really late here, and nobody is working here.....

Any ideas? or simply leave my e-smith box alone.. to take a deep breath between backups
alejandro...

[Rob Hillis]

Alejandro wrote:

> I'm thinking something could be wrong,
> My internal lan is a 100mb/s with a 3com office connect dual
> speed switch, (nics realtek)
> the average transfer rate WAS about 215kbps, and SEEMED to be
> matching (with switch improvement) Stephen's crossover
> connection.

Mine's currently a crossover connection (as I still don't have a 10/100 hub) to the server... I got sick of waiting 45 minutes to transfer an ISO image from my machine to the server...

> I use past cause when I run the backup first time, used win98
> and ms internet explorer ( )  but second time I used
> netscape 6
> with a transfer rate of 150 kbps and then i restart my pc but
> with linux mandrake and netscape 4.5 and i got a transfer
> rate of 90 kbps, so i decided to test again with windows 98
> and IE and got 75 kbps, what about that....?

I'm wondering what kind of backup system they use to create the backup file that gets transferred to you - possibly it's CPU intensive to generate and compress, and *that* may be the reason it's not all that quick...

> Each backup procces was done without any file addition to the
> server, so I think that something is wrong......
> And  also the size reported by e-smith manager is about 100mb
> bigger than the real backup size (140mb aprox)

That's no surprise... I'm guessing that they use a pretty simple formula to calculate the approximate backup size (probably df minus e-smith installation size)  It does say that if there's a lot of files in the /var folder, that the backup will be considerably smaller. (the files in my squid cache alone are nearly 100mb)

> always using same pc and connection and always a backup to
> desktop pc (hard disk) and overriding the previous file and
> no additional trafic with the server cause is really late
> here, and nobody is working here.....

Shouldn't be a problem...

> Any ideas? or simply leave my e-smith box alone.. to take a
> deep breath between backups

 I'm quite glad to have the tape backups now... I've got everything I need to do a complete restore without having to worry about it...

[Miguel]

I get transfers of more than 900 Kb/s. The card is 10Mb. Several cheap hubs, no switch. And this happens all time: downloading an ISO image to burn, backup to desktop to different machines (Win98), moving lots of files ...
Everything seems quite all right.

Salud