I inherited a backup plan from the previous sysadmin that looks like this:
Backup each 150GB of data from two fileservers to two 3.5in external harddrive (USB 2.0) by mapping the data partitions to our quad-core Dell R200 server (Windows Server 2003) and runs ntbackup (full backup running on thursday night). Each backup takes 9 hours to complete. The external hdds will be taken home by the COO every friday (our company is closed on weekends).
I've tried to backup directly from the 2 fileservers to the USB disks, but it takes more than 24 hours to complete since each of them runs on a slow processor.
I think this plan is ridiculous (is it?), but please, my question is:
Does the backup speed is highly affected by the speed of the USB port?