Backup to 1 TB Zip file

[ds452]

I'm just about to run a temporary backup of around 1,000,000 photo files, totalling 1TB.

I want to create this backup as fast as possible on my creaky 10yo microserver with USB3. I tried backing up to another drive on my RAID5 array in my server, but Syncback was reporting 5 days to run and counting when I stopped it.

I tested write speeds on an external 3TB drive, and for large movie files, it wrote at 150MB/s via USB3, which is twice what it was writing at to the same RAID5 array, so evidently, writing to an external drive is faster.

However - that speed dropped to 90kB/s when writing small files - ie. the photos I'm backing up. That's probably why SyncBack's time to run clocked up from a day to 5 days before I quit the backup.

I was thinking - writing a single large zip file, with no compression, would likely be much faster, as it's writing one large file rather than the separate file, metadata, etc for thousands of small ones. It probably won't make 150MB/s with the tiny celeron CPU, but as long as it's substantially faster, that's a good thing.

Hence, I was wondering whether I can use SyncBack in Compression mode, writing to a single file, in order to get the benefits of the speed of writing a single large file to the destination drive, or whether there'll be something that prevents me realising this. I suspect since the zip-file writing defaults to writing each file in its own zip archive, maybe this isn't an intended use case.

[Swapna]

Hi,

SyncBackSE allows backing up files into a single ZIP file, compressing all files into one archive before copying them to the destination. For additional information, refer to the "Data Encryption" article:
https://www.2brightsparks.com/resources ... ption.html

Thank you.