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I'm trying to backup my SSD to an external HDD And even when my folder is less than 50Gb it has more than 400.000 files, I'm just copying the folder using Windows Explorer and it says it will take more than 18 hours to finish just that small folder.

Is this normal or there is some faster alternative?

Enrique
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    *"Is ... there is some faster alternative?"* -- Instead of copying each individual file, make an *archive* of the folder and transfer just one file. See https://superuser.com/questions/344534/why-does-copying-the-same-amount-of-data-take-longer-if-spread-across-many-separ/344860#344860 – sawdust Jun 25 '20 at 21:08
  • @sawdust can you recommend me a way to do that in Windows? Do I need to first group all the folder in just one file in my local (hence I will need extra free space)? and what happen when I need to update the backup if only one file changed inside my folder? – Enrique Jun 25 '20 at 21:13
  • Well the ideal solution would have been to start the backup well before you had 400000 files and then done regular incremental backups :) – DavidPostill Jun 25 '20 at 21:16
  • @DavidPostill that will be useful 2 years ago :) Do you know if software like EaseUs, Acronis, Paragon etc will run faster for the initial backup (not the increments) than just copying the files manually? – Enrique Jun 25 '20 at 21:43
  • Try `robocopy` with its multithreaded option `/MT:`. Additionally it will solve the problem of updating changed files over time. – Appleoddity Jun 25 '20 at 23:10

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The safest and fastest way to do this would be to make a disk image, copying everything on the SSD, including system and hidden files, using a third-party tool such as Macrium Reflect Free. Because this uses direct disk I/O, rather than moving a single fle at a time and then creating anew the file system information, speed depends on the total size of the image, not number of files. On my PC's, using slow HHD's (not fast SSD's), speed is ~100 MB/second.

After the image is created, you can moun the image as if it were a disk drive and browse individual files. And, as an added advantage, should your SSD fail, you can restore the whole operating system, as well as data, from the image, to a new drive.

DrMoishe Pippik
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    do I need extra free space in my source SSD to create that image? or the image is created in live in my target HDD? (because my SSD is almost full) – Enrique Jun 25 '20 at 22:41
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    If you choose to install the imaging software on your SSD, you'll need room for that, only, but you can use Reflect, installed on another PC, to create a bootable USB drive with Reflect installed, so that **no space** on the SSD is used. Of course, the image must be created on another drive, but that does not use up sapce on your SSD. – DrMoishe Pippik Jun 26 '20 at 01:48
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Try packing all of the files into a single zip file and move it to your destination.

Ivan
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  • Why not simply write the zip file directly to the destination! – davidgo Jun 26 '20 at 01:37
  • but packing the files (I mean the creation of the zip file) is not even slower than just copying them? Also, how can I create a zip file of 100GB? is that possible? – Enrique Jun 26 '20 at 12:18
  • you do have a point though. Do you know how fast your ssd and external hdd is?? – Ivan Jun 26 '20 at 18:08