Month: April 2013

Windows Backup slowdown

My Windows 7 desktop is set up to back up to a Drobo B800i (over iSCSI) every night at 04:00, using Windows Backup. Even though it only uses about 700 GB of its 2 TB mirror, and only backs up a small fraction of that, backup jobs routinely took 15 hours or more. It could have copied the entire disk in half that time!

I set about hunting for a solution. One suggestion that turned up repeatedly in Google searches was to turn off the Background Intelligent Transfer Service. BITS is basically a download manager designed to only run when there is little or no other network traffic; among other thing, it is used by Windows Update to download patches. I couldn’t understand how this could help, but I had no better ideas and nothing to lose, so I stopped BITS. The next backup job completed in 45 minutes.

Patch Tuesday came along, and I rebooted the computer. Since I had only stopped BITS and not disabled it, it started again when the machine booted. Backup jobs slowed down again. This time, I disabled BITS, and I was back to sub-hour backups.

This makes absolutely no sense. BITS wasn’t even downloading anything; as far as I know, the only program or service I have running that actually uses it is Windows Update. BITS was slowing down backups just by being there. I don’t remember having this issue when I ran backups to an eSATA drive, so there must be some network-related interaction between BITS and iSCSI, but I have no idea what.

What Google knows about me

Based om my Google Ads profile:

Personal details
Gender: male No prize for guessing; it’s in my Google+ profile.
Age: 35-44
Languages: unknown I’m surprised they didn’t figure this one out. English, French, Norwegian.
Interests
Action & Adventure Films Vaguely
Air Travel I’ve booked two flights in the last 24 months. They don’t seem to have noticed that I’ve spent a lot of time recently researching ferries.
Banking Who doesn’t use Internet banking these days?
Bicycles & Accessories I own a bike. I’ve ridden it twice in the last six years.
Computer & Video Games Yes, definitely.
Consumer Electronics Depends on how you define the term. Computers, computer parts and peripherals, yes.
East Asian Music No
Fashion & Style You have hundreds of photos of me, and you never noticed that I always wear the exact same clothes?
Fiat Try Audi.
Food & Drink Yes, but not online.
Hair Care You have hundreds of photos of me, and you never noticed that I shave my head?
Hygiene & Toiletries I’ve used the same shower gel and deodorant for years. They’re both no-brand products sold in pharmacies.
Make-Up & Cosmetics You know I’m male. You know I’m straight. Do the math.
Olympics My initial reaction was “huh?”, but actually, yes. Mostly women’s handball, but also cross-country skiing and biathlon.
Online Video What does that even mean? You can’t throw a rock on the intertubes these days without hitting half a dozen lolcat videos. Not that I would ever throw a rock at a cat.
Rap & Hip-Hop They must have deduced that from all the P!nk and Avril Lavigne videos I watch on YouTube.
Search Engine Optimization & Marketing SEO & marketing “consultants” are scum.
Smart Phones Yes.