Perhaps you need to review your backup strategy. A regime of full backups once in a while, with intervening incremental or differential backups, should normally only take a few minutes with the occasional longer time. And do you really need to back up all of that data every time?

What backup program do you use? Something like Back in Time, which is quite similar to Apple’s Time Machine, might suit you.

3.1 Gen 1 is the same as 3.0 which is 5 Gbps theoretical. I've seen a 1 Gigabit ethernet run at 900 Mbps over a 3.0 connection, so high speeds are possible.

Any anti-malware tools running on your machine, and the drivers of the USB port, and lots of other things can make different drives quicker and slower. Check reviews.

In reply to a post by DFScale:

In reply to a post by Banger:

what I need is a large cache like the Crucial Momentum feature in Windows (2Gb-4Gb) but for Linux as I am backing up 2Gb files to an external SSD, the Crucial X6 1Tb.

Is it specifically 2GB files that you are backing up or a hard drive with 2GB files? May be rsync [there might be a pun in there] will do what you want?

rsync will back up a file system to a clone of that filesystem, only backing up anything which has changed since the last backup. I believe it can run in the background too, which could address your concerns about USB speed if your workflow will accommodate this.

Why 2gb files. I am using foxclone sometimes rescuezilla as redundancy which splits files backups into 2gb chunks which I believe is more efficient for the SSD cache and can backup individual partitions. Backup strategy is a full backup once a month (patch Tuesday) before MSFT updates and once a week before rolling updates of my linux partitions. Linux paritions only take 20 mins but I have to boot into foxclone because you cant backup a live system. Macrium the windows alternative isnt really Linux aware and diffs or incrementals copy the whole linux partition at a time and havent tested a restore with macrium.

So far I have found the fastest running OS is Debian 12.9 live ISO with Foxclone runs around 9GB/min and 15GB/min for a verify which cuts the time down.

I dont know if a cache will make much difference as when I write files to USB stick they are fast in Solus but when I reboot it takes ages to flush the cache and the USB light stays on for about 5 minutes after hitting the restart button.

I have just tried Acronis and it took overnight to backup 1tb to my external 3tb WD on USB3 so that is a non starter. I know HDD is only 125MB/s but overnight seems a long time.

Image backup tools are fine for occasional use for disaster recovery, but totally inappropriate for regular backups. No wonder your backups take so long.

Use a backup program not a cloning program.

In reply to a post by TinyMongomery:

Image backup tools are fine for occasional use for disaster recovery, but totally inappropriate for regular backups. No wonder your backups take so long.

Use a backup program not a cloning program.

I was using Macrium with diff and incremental but it was taking as long as a clone.

Cloning is the wrong level of file system abstraction. Imagine the consequences of a duff sector on your clone disk. It means that the whole image can only be a failure. Whereas a backup of files will ride on and not use bad sectors.

Does your backup disk have plenty of free space?

And it makes it a nightmare to restore individual files.

Incremental backups using sync (or some wrapper program) should only take minutes unless you are changing huge amounts of data per day. Even when using a mechanical hard disk.

Personally, l wouln’t use an SSD as the destination for backups.

In reply to a post by TinyMongomery:

Does your backup disk have plenty of free space?

I have 4 backup disks, 2 x 1tb portable SSDs and 2 x 3tb HDDs which I rotate. With compression the 1tb disks have about 200gb spare after a backup.

If each backup is using 800GB, with compression, I’d suggest that you are not doing incremental backups.

Disk space down to 20% free probably impinges on backup speed somewhat, but not to the extent you describe. Do you format the disks before the backups?