Try to use Hyper Backup to back up to a USB drive and it has been running for days

[jamesd]

I used to have tasks set up to back up data to usb drives. Then the tasks failed. I deleted the old tasks and started a new task two weeks ago. First it took almost a week then failed with no detailed message. Last weekend I restarted it and it took three days already with only 40% of file scanning.

Any help? I am using DS918+ and have 5.8TB of data (but only 2TB need to back up)

 

[kiriak]

I don't have an idea what is wrong,
but I would try to test it using a fraction of the data to be backed up, maybe 200-500 Gb

and why not, splitting the backup task to a few smaller tasks, like 3-6, depending on the shares

 

[jamesd]

Thanks for the comments. That's a good idea and I may give a try if this run fails again at the end (may take a few days to know).

I use two USB drives (5TB each) to do the offsite backup. I plan to do it once a week and once it is done I will take the drive away so it may be more convenient to do a whole backup at once, if it works though.

 

[kiriak]

this is almost what I do,
I use 2 different USB hard drives that I keep at my work's office (encrypted)
every weekend, or whenever I remember or when I am back from vacation and a lot of new photos exist,
I bring one of these 2 to home and run the backup

On each drive there are more than one backup tasks, even if my total data on the NAS are only about 1 TB

Some shares are archives from my job, they don't change even in 6 months, so these tasks do not run so often
other shares change constantly, and I included these on the (backup) tasks I run every week

there is no reason to have only one backup task for the whole NAS,

additionally for some of my shares, I want different retention rules, eg for my PC disk images I don't want to keep backup versions of 1 year or more old,
so these go to a different backup task

each time I bring a USB HDD to home for the Hyperbackup I run the tasks I want, not every existing task
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HyperBackup is a very versatile application for backing up the NAS,
and is one of the two* reasons I haven't yet moved to FreeNAS
(even if Synology's lack of support for Linux with desktops apps is pushing me to do so)

* (the other one is PhotoStation)

 

[jamesd]

Exactly what I want to realize.

I omitted the computer images already. I have dozens of shared folders and they all will be updated each week (as accessed by different employees and work groups), though there aren't too many changes each week. I am hoping after the initial run the rest backups will take less time (it only back up the changes next time, right?)

 

[kiriak]

right !

 

[MRL_NAS]

Same situation. I am backing up 4tb to two separate USB drives that get rotated monthly with one stored offsite. Use 1 task to complete this. The first backup took well over 2 days. I cloned that drive to another of the same make model. Ran "incremental" to both with no issues. Again using the same task. Seems to be working well for me at this point. The drive is available to me on other Win10 machines using a utility to mount the EXT4 formatted HyperBackup drive and files available with HyperBackup Explorer. I am new to Synology and NAS operations in general but this seems to work quite well.

 

[AdrianEarnshaw]

I used to do something similar until this pandemic hit and I'm not allowed in my place of work. I tended to split the jobs up depending on the folders. For example, as a musician I would set up one task for current projects and another for archived finished projects. Had a separate one for my sample libraries etc, I then ran them as and when changes occured. Saved money on using cloud. However, now with this pandemic I've had to resort to using cloud back up (currently trialing C2) but still do something similar just not as much due to space.

 

[jamesd]

My last try of the backup failed again after running for over three days. The error message says "Failed to start integrity check".

I am going to split the folders that I need to back up first as Kiriak suggested. Then I'd like to use the strategy MRL_NAS does as I need two backups as well.

 

[Shadow]

The error message says "Failed to start integrity check".

This should be a separate task. If you run a backup without the integrity check, does it then report that it was successful?

 

[jamesd]

I created a new backup task with one folder only and without the integrity check yesterday. Now it has been 24 hours and still shows 33%...

 

[fredbert]

Can you try a different USB drive? A different USB port. Just to confirm it's not a hardware issue.

 

[jamesd]

I was wondering what is going on as well. It has been two days already. Does it have anything to do with compression and encryption? It shows 46% with 260GB processed and 160385 files scanned. Does it scan all the files no matter which folder to back up ? I recall my last backup (about two months ago) that was 'normal'.
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Can you try a different USB drive? A different USB port. Just to confirm it's not a hardware issue.

I will bring another drive tomorrow and create another task.

 

[AdrianEarnshaw]

Just to rule something out try backing up a small file, say something around 100mb. It can take a long time for the NAS to process a couple of hundred gig.

 

[jamesd]

Finally the backup completed successfully, which took nine and half days. Size of backup files is only 500GB. I will keep trying...

 

[jamesd]

Just to summarize here: did two full backup using two external hard drives, all completed, one took days (reason could be the settings for encryption), the other did not take very long.

I also did a couple of updates of the backups later on, both ran very fast.

Thanks everyone for your comments.