Help › Restoring

A large restore is taking a long time

Restoring a whole drive, or a folder of hundreds of thousands of files, can take an hour or more with any backup product. Every file has to be created and written, however small, and the data has to cross the network.

Is it working?

The restore window shows a bar with items and gigabytes done and the time remaining. If those numbers are rising, it is working. You can close the window; the restore carries on, and reopening it shows where it has got to.

What speeds it up

• Restore what you need first. Get today's urgent folder back, then start the rest. Search finds things fast.
• A network cable, not Wi-Fi. The slowest link sets the pace.
• Antivirus. It scans every file as it is written. Excluding the folder you are restoring into from real-time scanning, for the duration, can make a large difference. Remove the exclusion afterwards.
• Restore into an empty folder. It is the fastest case. Restoring over files that are already there is fine, and only writes what is missing, but has to compare first.
• From the server, for a whole machine: use Restore to a folder on this server rather than a download.

Not solved? Contact us, and attach diagnostics if you can.