Something's not right...

[Deleted User]

Last time I did a full backup it took four discs plus another for the system repair, and lasted about an hour perhaps.

This morning I started 55 mins ago, and it's still on the first disc. It says 58% complete, I don't know whether that's supposed to be 58% of the disc or 58% of the backup, but it can't be right either way.

Edit: It's been stuck ay 58% for five minutes now, even though the disc's whirring.

wongataa

Back up to an external hard drive instead. It will be quicker, not require multiple discs, and be more reliable.

[Deleted User]

I've got a HDD on order, but if I ignore a problem with the DVD drive it defeats the point of having it.

googler

Does the DVD drive behave with other applications?

Gyro

If you're backing up to DVD's (or an external disk with limited space) it would probably help a lot if you first ran CCleaner to clear as much storage as possible. Also you could disable the Hibernate function to clear a BIG chunk of storage.
You can always re-enable it after you've made your backup.

Open a Command Prompt window (as Administrator) and enter the following

powercfg -h off

To re-enable it do the same but with

powercfg -h on

You can see the Hibernate file as C:/hiberfil.sys

On my Win8.1 32bit, I've just enabled it to check and it's showing over 2GB. I normally have it turned off as I don't use it.


You could also save a big chunk of space by turning off the Virtual Memory, aka Pagefile (C:/pagefil.sys), as that's about half a Gig on my system. Turn on again after you've backed up.

To turn off or change pagefile.sys (aka Virtual Memory)

Start > Right-click on PC > Properties > Advanced System Settings > Enter admin password > Advanced tab > Performance Settings > Performance Options 'Advanced' tab > Programs > Change > Untick 'Auto manage' > Select C: drive > Select 'No paging file' > Set > OK

(That's how I usually get to it - though there's probably a quicker way)

p.s. If you want a nice visual display of all the space on your disks you should run the free WinDirStat

,

cookie365

jack_pott wrote: »

I've got a HDD on order, but if I ignore a problem with the DVD drive it defeats the point of having it.

You're right - there is no point in having a DVD drive these days.

paddyrg

Also, the percentages you see on screen, or progress bars, are pure estimates. They have to be programmed.

If, for instance, you've 10 files to copy, 9 are 1kB and the last one 10MB, the progress bar could either go up by 10% for each file and seem to freeze for the big one, or it could count through the total data size in a roughly linear manner, so show 1% when 9 files were actually copied. Both ways have their pluses and minuses, but neither is anything more than an indication as they're both true.