So I've been working with my Acer Revocenter WHS2011 box for about 4 months, and in general I like it, Drivebender resolved the pooling concerns, but somewhere along the lines weird backup stuff started happening.

I know that the first backup takes forever, and then from what I understood, the additional backups became incrementals, that makes sense to me. However somewhere in the past month or so the daily backups (assumed incremental) stopped taking a few hours and started taking 8 hours. Granted I have a huge data set, but 90% of that data does not change daily, so any thoughts on what's going on??

WHS2011 is setup with the system on a 120GB SSD, 2GB RAM, and then 4x 2TB drives pooled with DB for the data storage.
I have another 4TB in 4x1TB drives connected via USB that I was trying to use for internal server backups, but they seem to lock up occasionally, so I'm about to remove them.

I get at least 2 or 3 random lockups in the week where it appears that something has run out of memory and a hard power cycle is needed, and I HATE doing this, but there are zero errors logged before the power cycle.

I also occasionally see reference to pausing the client backups, but I'm stumped as to how to manage that, all I see is Stop.. and that stops and cancels them.

Your backups should only take minutes not an hour. First thing to look at is the network connectivity speed on your server and on your clients. I would assume your running a Gigabit Network but if not the backups would take longer at 10/100.

The next thing to look at is the actual health of your storage pool drives. I would assume your have your client backups on your storage pool so verifying the health of those drives will be important because if a drive is having issues then it will slow things down. Any drives connected USB in your pool will also slow things down.

I have no experience with Drive Bender or how well it works as I use Stablebit Drive Pool and I am not certain which is better so for that part I would have to defer to others who use it.

_________________
Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8

1.0 Gb copper, both server and client PC on the same Netgear Gb switch,
The client PC has 1.2TB of data, but I'm excluding folders that contain easily 40% of that data so we're talking about 600GB for a backup,
The client backups folder on the server backs this up with about 1.0TB of files in it, that makes sense for the base and then some incrementals.
If I look at the daily files changed it's only about 1.0 GB that were changed yesterday.
I'm about to pull the client backups drive from the DriveBender pool and try a plain 2.0TB for it for a while.
I've pulled the USB drives temporarily for testing.

My WHS v1 server never had this issue, in some ways I prefer its backup dialogs since they gave me more info on what it was doing and which drives it was processing.

FWIW it's at 50% at the 8 hours running mark
I'm willing to say that it only backs up on weekends since it's not on in the day on weekdays, but this is still crazy.

I agree that is crazy. You may want to look at the drives in the client as well as the server just to make certain they are in good health and you may also want to run a CHKDSK on the drives to make sure the file system is in good order. If your client has multiple drives try just backing up the OS Drive and see if that makes a difference then you can add the other drives later if you so desire.

For me I am only concerned with the OS Drive and not any data drives I may have in my clients but there is a rare occasion when I may include another drive in the backup but its a very rare occasion because anything that would typically be on those drives would be on the server already or slated to be moved to the server in good time. Anything that's of great importance then gets backed up elsewhere for protection but what I do may not be appropriate for you.

As for my primary reason for wanting only to backup the OS drive and I always try to keep those to a single partition and since I an now using SSD's I have downsized the OS Drive even more between 120-240GB. My primary concern is that should I need to perform a recovery I am only interested in getting the OS, software and some misc items restored as all other data is backed up and protected.

I do know if a drive be it in the server or client is messing up that client backups would become difficult or if space for the backups were tight. Typically for me any issue with a back up has always been on the client end.

_________________
Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8

11 hours later it finished it's weekly backup.
I wish there was a way to see what data it's backing up, but I bet it was most of it.
The one thing I don't care about is my OS system disk, I view an OS as disposable, it's only the data that has value (sysadmin at her best.. only the data matters!)

Granted I copy it elsewhere, but I like having a good copy of my drives for a hardware failure.
I've run chkdsk on all my drives and they always report fine, I have noticed that the drive it's belching on most of the time is the 2TB drive that's 1/2 full, and to answer the next question, no it's not a GPT drive.

This kept acting like this for months, I just stopped worrying about it and had been considering going back to WHS 1.x but decided it was too much work.
Then a few weeks ago I upgraded to Windows 8.1, the issue magically resolved itself, backups now take only a few hours..

Since 8.1 backups fly, today I had one done in under 90 minutes, I don't know what changed, but this is a great change.

I know your hardwired on a Gigabit network but have you actually confirmed your server and client are both running a 1.0 Gbps? I was working on a client a while back and things ran really slow and yes took forever. I was doing a recovery on this client and when it was all said and done the connection was running at 100 Mbps not 1 Gbps for some reason.

Then the other day I was moving files to my server and noticed the transfer speed was horribly slow and the cause was a single drive in the server. Once I removed that drive from my storage pool my file transfer speed returned to normal. If you have a drive in the server or on the client which maybe experiencing some issues if might be in your best interest to remove it to see if things speed up or not.

Now in my desktop I do run a 256 GB SSD with a 1.5TB Data drive and that data drive had about 600-700 GB of files and it still only took minutes to backup not hours. This data drive is mostly a temporary storage drive used for ripping media and storing my downloads. So what it stored varies from time to time. I also know that if you have a not so kosher file on a system it will bog things down when that particular file is being accessed.

As for Win8.0 vs 8.1 I cannot say I have noticed any speed increase in the backup times. Now today I am running WS2012E but I also do run a WHS2011 server and backup clients to both and again the backups take only minutes like 4-6 minutes over a good gigabit network but if I see them taking longer I begin to look at everything. I will also look at any back round tasks which may also be running which may cause a reduction of speed as well but typically my backups will occur during times when there are no other maintenance tasks taking place on any of my clients.

_________________
Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8

Trust me, it was 8.1 not the network that resolved it.
I had been full GB copper and it was slow, even swapped wiring configs so the server and desktop were on the same switch.
Then I moved houses and went to powerline, same issue, horrendously long backups.

First set of Win 8.1 backups, lightning fast.

I have not had the experience you had except for the time with a bad cable but with my mothers notebook and its a long story but with Win 8 and now 8.1 she has been having network issues and they are all connectivity. I have also noticed since running Win8 and WS2012E that the drivers I install get changed an while they work they lose the functionality I desire most and its something most people would never notice. So I would tend to agree there is something about Win8 and 8.1 and its causing me to want to go back to Win7.

_________________
Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8