Extremely low performance: Whole External Disk Encrypted, then a Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) on Win7

[localmonocle]

Hi,

Would really appreciate help.
Bought a new external HDD (WD My Passport 4TB) to function as my Backup Disk for my Win7 64bit System for the built-in Windows Backup/Restore tool.
The exernal WD disk connects to my system via USB 3.0.
System disk is an SDD. Also have an internal HDD for storage.

I encrypted the whole 4TB WD external disk with Vera Crypt.
I used the encryption that had the highest performance in the benchmarks, AES in my case.
The encryption of the drive took place with satisfactory speeds (around 80-95 mb/s).

Then, I realized that Win7 Backup/Restore tool does not recognize the mounted Vera Crypt volume as a hard drive that it can backup to.

I researched and found one note of someone who said he circumvented this with a virtual hard disk.
Hence, I created a VDH on the vera crypt volume. VHD of fixed size: nearly all of the available space, but I left 40GB free, because I thought I should not use all the space on the volume.

The creation of the VHD also seemed to progress with a 'normal' kind of speed. Still took a very long time because of the 4TB drive, but it was done when I left the computer overnight.

When I mounted this new VHD, Windows Backup did recognize that new volume and it was a selectable disk for the backup.

Now, before actually backing up on this new encrypred disk, I wanted to migrate the contents of my old backup disk (a WD 2TB external HDD) to this new encrypted back up disk, so I still have my old backups available.

My old backups were 2TB of size, so I did not want to use Windows Explorer for the copying.
I googled and decided to try / use Tera Copy, so I can pause/resume the process if some problem arises.

Now, this transfer started out fine, with speeds of about 80mb/s.
I left the computer overnight, but on the next day, I realized the speed had come down very, very much.
I think it was like 500kb/s.

The whole system seems a bit unstable, the new hdd aspect.
Sometimes I open diskmgmt and it hangs on 'loading disk information'.
My computer basically froze 2 times, it must somehow be connected to whatever's going on here with my copy/pasting or the mouning of a close to 4TB VHD.
Had to hard restart once without dismounting the VHD or the vera crypt volume first, because the whole system broke down and I could not access diskmgt anymore to eject the VHD.
When I rebooted though, I was able to mount everything again and continue the copy process in Tera Copy.

I thought maybe Tera Copy is at fault, but when I paused Tera Copy and tried out the normal Windows Copy/Paste, it was even slower than Tera Copy, like 300kb/s.

Does anyone have any tips I could try out?
I disabled indexing on the Vera Crypt volume and the VHD.

I dont have any other processes doing any kind of copying or anything like that. No antivirus scan in the background or the like.

Sometimes, when I eject the VHD and then the Vera Crypt volume, and then re-mount everything, it will start out with a better speed (like 9mb/s), but then it slows down again to 200kb/s - 500kb/s.

The copy process is still going on, and the ETA is like 18 days :-/

Let me know if I forgot to supply some important information.
Would really appreciate any tip or help !
Thank you.

[Enigma2Illusion]

From the FAQ:

How can I perform a Windows built-in backup on a VeraCrypt volume? The VeraCrypt volume doesn't show up in the list of available backup paths.

Windows built-in backup utility looks only for physical driver, that's why it doesn't display the VeraCrypt volume. Nevertheless, you can still backup on a VeraCrypt volume by using a trick: activate sharing on the VeraCrypt volume through Explorer interface (of course, you have to put the correct permission to avoid unauthorized access) and then choose the option "Remote shared folder" (it is not remote of course but Windows needs a network path). There you can type the path of the shared drive (for example \ServerName\sharename) and the backup will be configured correctly.

[localmonocle]

Thank you for your reply and the information.

I was aware of this workaround, but I read somewhere, that if I do it this way, some aspect of incremental backup will not work. I think incremental backups for the system image are disabled when the destination is a network location, rather than a 'physical' drive.
In any case, the transfer speed was so slow, I reformatted the True Crypt Volume and I'm now copying over the contents from my old backup disk at ~20mb/s and plan to use the network workaround you described.
I hope this speed will remain constant and not go down after 50% like the last time.

I tried googling this, but to no avail:
If I have mounted a vera crypt volume, and then in windows explorer right click the decrypred vera crypt volume and do a quick format from there - that is okay, I hope? I just wanted to have a clean format again before starting the big transfer.

I'm guessing all the random data that was written when I did the slow encryption process of the drive is still on there, even if it's not accessible to the OS? I mean, I hope this is a thing one can do without compromising security. Or should I have done the 15hour disk encryption process again when I wanted to reformat to get rid of the huge VHD file?

edit: Btw, my CPU is not the bottleneck, I think. CPU Usage in Performance tab varies between 1% to 6% while the copy transfer is going on. and there's about 10gb of unused RAM.

[Dirk Schulz]

I am experiencing exactly the same issues with an internal HDD (https://sourceforge.net/p/veracrypt/discussion/technical/thread/c6d6f326/#c13c).

Were you able to resolve the performance issues? I am basically also stuck at about 20MB/s - which is odd given the CPU load and using HDDs that can do 80MB/s via USB 3.0 in your case or 160MB/s via SATA in mine, respectively.

P.S. I also would recommend robocopy, that works very well maintaining also oiriginal dates of files and folders. Possibly makes sense to add /A-:SH (at least in my case, the copied folders were hidden).

[Enigma2Illusion]

See thread below.

https://veracrypt.codeplex.com/discussions/572258#post1322742

I would use Microsoft's Robocopy.

You can quick format the mounted volume using the assigned drive letter without issue or security concerns.

[localmonocle]

Thanks again.