I have a laptop PC. It came with Windows 7 Professional installed on it. It has one disk in it that identifies itself as being 287Gb with about 50Gb free (tiny by modern standards). I did a first backup to a new USB at the weekend. I say at the weekend, but it actually only finished late on Tuesday. I started another backup to the same USB drive at 00:30 last night and now at 11:40 it's just complete. Clearly this is rubbish; it should not take half a day just to copy data from a small PC. The problem isn't the local antivirus; turning that off does not speed things up. It isn't that the PC is struggling to zip the backup files; it's a Core 2 Duo P8700 and is very fast at doing everything else. it isn't the speed of the connection to the USB drive; I can copy 50Gb down there in less than 30 minutes. Another curious problem is that the 931Gb backup drive now only has 354Gb free on it - so my two backups (the second of which I'd expect to be mostly incremental) take up 2.4 times the space that I have used on my PC on the backup drive! Clearly something is very very wrong here.

Hi, Please try the following hotfix to see how it works: The backup process requires significantly more time when you use the Windows Backup utility in Windows 7 if the size of the backup files increases Hope it helps. Alex ZhaoPlease remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

Yes, that did work - a backup took less than a day after installing it.

I use an alternative backup approach with Windows Vista or Windows 7 systems, as I reckon the built-in backup tools are lousy: 1. make sure all your data (databases, office docs, etc) get saved to one clear location (I use a network-enabled drive mapped to my PC as Z: drive) 2. use ROBOCOPY periodically to mirror this data to a portable USB drive, to be stored off-site at my work (I use a pair of them, one is always at work in case of disaster) 3. use the System Image part of Windows backup only (which works GREAT!), to take an image of the PC once a week, stored also on the portable USB drive I have about 400GB of data (music/video files, databases, years of accumulated business files, etc). The ROBOCOPY mirror job took about 1 day to run the very first time, but now it takes about 10 minutes only, as it is just maintaining the existing mirrored copy on the portable drives. The complete system image of my PC (about 60GB I guess) takes about 40 minutes. So the whole thing is done in less than 1 hour. I do this religiously every weekend and it has saved my computing life 2 or 3 times now when drives have failed.