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All back to normal now.  Thanks.

I wonder if my emails to you regarding my Plus membership being broken might be going to spam?  I first wrote about two weeks ago, and again recently.  It still says Plus member next to my username when I log in, but I am not receiving any Plus-member newsletter emails, nor can I access them manually.  The Private Messaging system also denies me permission to access it.  Thanks.

EDIT:  I note it doesn’t show the Plus icon next to my name in this post.

Paul T wrote:

Which version or BC do you use?

I have the final update of BC 4, namely 4.4.7 (build 28397).

I only use a fraction of its capabilities.  Need to tinker with more of them, and find out if the enhancements in v5 justify an upgrade.   If you are already a user, which version do you have?

TechTango wrote:

If by this you mean simply mounting (double click) your image file on a external drive, that would by my choice. It will then just show as another drive in “This PC”.

Yes, that’s what I meant.  And thanks for the tip on FreeFileSync.  Beyond Compare, which I mentioned in the OP easily and efficiently handles mass copy tasks, but after looking at FreeFileSync’s website I see some features that could prove very useful.

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TechTango

All very interesting, including how much faster Robocopy is than Explorer.  Thanks for all the detail.

 

What are file transfer speeds like over home network (which I would have to set up)?  I have used XXCopy for pc migration in the past, so I suppose Robocopy would be the successor to that?  My newer PC doesn’t have ethernet, so I’d have to get an adapter.

johnf wrote:

Why not just zip the documents into one file, and copy that to the new PC? You’d have a much smaller file that would be quicker and faster to copy. Documents (unless they are PDFs or graphic intensive) usually shrink down to an amazingly small file. You should always check your zip though afterwards (just check zip documentation for how to confirm a good zip).

I considered zip.  But I do have a lot of pdfs and media files (pics and video), and the system image is already available.  And, in line with what Paul T mentioned, I sometimes find I have a need for app data that is not stored in the Documents folders.

Paul T wrote:

It also means you have a copy of anything else you may want – quite a lot of data is not stored in “Documents”, particularly app data. This is why an image backup should always be your first backup.

Yes, I did have this in mind as well.  Probably should’ve mentioned it in original post.

 

 

 

Paul T wrote:

It’s exactly the same as internal media. Power out during a cached write is bad, m’kay. (We use battery backed disk controllers on servers for this reason.) You need to check the integrity of your data if this occurs, especially the data you were writing.

Is a split second outage just as bad as a longer one during a cached write?

EDIT:  Now that I think about it, that question probably doesn’t make sense.  Any harm is likely to happen at the instant power is lost.

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Ed Tittel

Paul T wrote:

With caching enabled you need to make sure all writes have finished and you use the “eject” option before removing the drive.

Yes, I’m aware of that. My question is about the *nature and extent* of data loss that could occur should power outage occur during data transfer with write caching enabled. How likely is that something other than the data transfer itself would be corrupted? I’m thinking of things like possible corruption other files already on the external drive, or possible harm to the drive itself.

In fact, this subject is actually my primary reason for posting.  The speed info was more as background, and in case higher-speed writes could further affect the extent of any possible data corruption after an unexpected power loss or equipment failure.

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Ed Tittel

Paul T wrote:

If you are making a backup the cache will be exhausted fairly quickly and you will be back to only 300MB. You can test this by copying a multi-GB file using Robocopy – it produces a nice performance summary, but you must use the “NP” option to disable the screen updates until the copy finishes.

I copied a 111GB file to the Acasis Thunderbolt 4 drive using Robocopy. (Actually it was a 111GB folder with that large file and two tiny ones. I had a hard enough time figuring out how to get Robocopy to do *that*, let alone a single file copy.) I used the /NP switch.

Stats: Copy time 1 minute 6 seconds for the 111GB. Speed: 1716.7 MB/s (I just took the number Robocopy gave in bytes and divided by one million.) So if it were a straight-line decline in speed (and I don’t know if that’s a good assumption), the ending speed would have been 732MB/s ([2700+732]/2=1716).

And could the SSD itself have some impact on that? The one I’m using in the Acasis is a to-date unused 4TB Crucial P3 Plus, which is Gen 4 but — according to what I’ve read — uses older technology that subjects it to large drops in transfer speed, especially during long transfers and as the drive fills.

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Ed Tittel

I recently did buy the Acasis TBU405 Pro external M2 NVME SSD enclosure, the one with the fan.  It supports Thunderbolt 4, as does my Win 10 laptop (Lenovo Thinkpad P1 Gen 5).

I inserted that Crucial P3 Plus SSD I mentioned and then tested transfer speeds, which I’ve read are typically 2500-3000 MB/s with that setup, for both read and write.  Well, I got about 3000 MB/s read but only 300 MB/s write.  While that write speed was FAR better than I had been getting with USB 3, it was nowhere near 2500-3000.

Then I read a review that says Windows 10 and 11 disable write caching on external drives by default.  I checked the properties for the Acasis, and sure enough that was the case.  So I ticked the box to enable write caching, and boom, now I am getting about 2700 MB/s writes.  Absolutely blazing.

But that leads to my question:  Is it unwise to enable write caching, especially on a drive that will be used primarily for creating system drive images and other backups?  As you know, Windows has that disclaimer that with write caching enabled, a power outage or equipment failure might result in data loss or corruption.  And I don’t have an uninterruptible power supply.

I further wonder, in the event data loss or corruption does result, is it likely to be confined to the data I was attempting to transfer at the time?  That wouldn’t be so bad, because what I’m transferring is typically an image or a copy, i.e. redundant to what’s still on the source drive.  Or could it also cause issues with other data that’s already on the external drive — which would be much worse?

CORRECTION #2, again re dotNET 4.8:   As with the SMQR, the update used is for Server 2008 R2 x64.  This and the last correction were probably obvious, but I didn’t want to leave even a little doubt.

BTW, I haven’t noticed any issues since the updates, although I don’t use that computer much.

 

CORRECTION:  The dotNET 4.8 Quality Rollup was installed using the latest version of the dotNetFx4 installer

 

Summarizing what I wrote in bits and pieces above, here is how I proceeded with the Win 7 updates (on a less-frequently-used machine, for test purposes) :

1. Installed 2025-01 Servicing Stack 2025-01 Servicing Stack KB5050681 a few days ago, using installer v.4 W7ESUI_0_4.  Then, today:
2. Downloaded (without any interventions) and installed 2025-01 Rollup KB5050049 (for Server 2008 R2 x64), using v.4 W7ESUI_0_4.  Restarted.
3. Downloaded and installed 2025-01 dotNET 4.8 Quality Rollup KB5049619 (for Windows Embedded 7), using W7ESUI.  Restarted. (Initial failures turned out to be caused by interventions by my new AV, now solved.)
4. Ran MSRT via Windows Update.

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SteveIT, Pim, abbodi86