Question re the verification process speed at the beginning of a Genie Backup

[JeffK]

I've already posted this on the Genie-Soft forums but someone here might be able to help also.

I have a 20 GB partition which is almost full which I am backing up with Genie. I took a full backup and then take incremental backups every few days. I'm a bit bemused by the amount of time that Genie takes to do the "verification" step at the beginning of the backup process. Given that I only want to incrementally back up a few new and changed files should I not expect Genie to find and copy them easily rather than go through and process every file on the partition again?

Any comments would be welcome. I'm not sure I'm not doing something wrong.

Thanks, Jeff

[Carol Haynes]

How will it know which files have changed if it doesn't look?

[JeffK]

It seems to look at every file.  I would have thought it just needed to look at wheher the archive bit is set.  It seems to take as long in that verification process for an incremental backup as it does for the full backup.

Jeff

[Carol Haynes]

To look at the archive bit it will need to look at every file. The only alternative is to have a background process running that keeps a list of files as they change.

[JeffK]

What I am trying to say is that it is so slow.  Accessing every file to verify or populate the backup list is one thing but just checking the FAT? for changed archive bits should be a lot faster.  It seems to me it is doing some sort of file integrity check.

Jeff

[JeffK]

Compare for example Handy Backup.  Once one sets up the parameters and presses start it starts to back up straight away.  Genie accesses my partition for a good 20 minutes before it touches the destination.

Jeff

[Carol Haynes]

The only people who can really help you on this are over at the Genie website. Have you contacted their customer support?

[JeffK]

Yes, I've posted on the forumover there.  I'll see what response I get.

J

[Carol Haynes]

Let us know when you hear please

[JeffK]

I think I might have found the problem.  I had my virus checker (BitDefender) and I think it is testing the files as they are verified.  When I turn it off it seems a lot faster.

Jeff

[Carol Haynes]

Great - different AVs have odd properties. I use NOD32 and find it has problems with some archived files - esp. if I have advanced heuristics enabled. Glad you got it sorted - it would explain why others didn't experience it too

[f0dder]

I can second your problems with on-demand virus scanners. I tend to turn them off temporarily when doing defrags or backups, it can speed up things TREMENDOUSLY. BitDefender (work) and NOD32 (home) are notoriously bad wrt. this.

Kaspersky is pretty good if you enable it's "NTFS streams" features, because it uses those streams to keep a cached "is this file good" check, boosting speed quite a bit. Unfortunately, KAV uses rootkit-like techniques to hide the presence of those streams, so using SysInternals Rootkit Revealer you'll get an insane amount of file discrepancies - I wish KAV had chosen a single central database instead.

At work, on-demand scanning isn't disabled... but the cheery ol' people there don't really notice it