Hard Disk Manager 15 Pro takes days to backup 4TB hard drive.

Hi. I recently purchased Hard Disk Manager 15 Pro to enable me to backup my photos and videos to an external USB hard drive (USB 2 port). I keep all these on a second internal 4TB hard drive. About 4 days ago I started a backup using the "Backup to VD" option and it has been running ever since. It is still running now claiming it is 78% done and there are 17 hours 11 minutes to go. When I first started the backup I think it estimated about 11 hours. My computer is an Intel i7 running at 3.4 GHz, with 8 GB of RAM, running Windows 7 Home Premium, SP1.

Is it really supposed to take this long?

Do I need to invest in something a bit faster, like NAS storage?

Are there any settings I can change to make it go faster?

Would I be better off backing up using a file-by-file approach rather than backing up an entire partition (which I take it is what the "Backup to VD" option does)?

Any help or suggestions appreciated.

do you have anything else running in the background (another file monitoring system, backup system, etc, not the normal word processor or other minor programs).

the IMAGE backup should work - however, it may take time, if it is a full 4 terabytes.
i do a backup of 88 gig c: drive, condenses to about a 60 gig backup, and takes about 1 1/2 hours to run, on USB 2.0 connection (faster on usb 3.0)
SO, if we divide 4000 gig (4 tb) by 80 gig), i get 50 , so 50 x 1 and 1/2 hours, seems like your s is right on track, unless my math is wrong

if this is corredct, there are other programs that might back up the 4tb faster, and even paragon may do this if you use the file instead of image mechanism. also, i just tried PHDM 16, versus 15, and got about a 20% incrase in speed

Well it finally finished, four days after it started, and it seems to have worked. Guess it just takes that long.

It is possible I have the odd thing running in the background. I used to use Acronis for backing up, but the last incremental backup I did got stuck at 90% for about a day, so I switched to Paragon. However, it is still installed on my computer.

Not sure if its possible, but if I boot from the CD, and then backup, then this would prevent all other processes starting up and might speed things up.

I shall investigate. Next thing to try is an incremental backup.

Thanks for your help.

the incremental should take FAR LESS time because you're just backing up changes.
HOWEVER< my suggestion is that if you have a 4tb drive, with music, photo's, etc, and this is NOT your working c: drive, then get a SECOND 4 tb drive, and do a MIRRORED FILE backup, so that drive (or directories) are a direct match to the original.

Now, I have not experimented much with Paragon's file backup mechanism, whether it can make a mirrored file of the music, photo's, etc.
I use Paragon primariliy for IMAGES of my c: drive, with my working programs, NOT data, so that I can restore that drive in event of disaster.

for my DATA , I have it on a D: drive (couplle terabytes) and I use SYNCOVERY, which can compare my d: drive/folders to myh M: drive/folders (my mirrored drive) and copy things on a file by file basis, AND I can USE the M: drive if hte d: drive blows up.
Paragon MAY do this, I'm not sure, but I have used both SYNCOVERY and PARAGON for many years, as they are both excellent programs.

I h ave had disk crashes, and have had to RESTORE from paragon images, and believe me, they saved my rear end many times!

to EXPERIMENT, create a small 500 meg directory/folder, and set up a paragon backup task for copying that folder to a backup disk, etc, and see how the structure is.
makes it much easier than 4 tb of data.

That's sort of what I'm doing, only I don't mirror the disk, just back it up incrementally. i.e. I have a 1TB internal drive with the operating system and applications on it, a second 4TB internal drive with all my data on it (mainly photos and videos), and an external 4TB drive (USB 2 connection) which is turned off most of the time. The plan is to back up from the internal 4TB to the external 4TB.

I think I'll stick with this plan for now, but I might invest in another external drive and try making that a mirror of the internal 4TB drive.

I might still consider a NAS drive, although they do seem rather complicated, with fancy features like transcoding video files which I don't need. I just want it for backup, not to act like a server.

Would suggest the problem is using USB2 as this is very slow. I had a faulty 4TB USB3 Disc and he took 20+hrs to do a 990MB backup!! Exchanged it and the same job took 2.5hrs.
Would not recommend USB2 for anything but small file transfers.