jimnms - 2023-12-08

I have a 5TB external USB 3 drive that I encrypt with VeraCrypt. I bought it about 6 months ago to replace a smaller drive because I needed more space. Lately I've noticed backups to it being very slow. I typically back up to it every week, and depending on what's changed, it takes 20 minutes to an hour. Lately it's taken 1-1.5 hours for the same amount of data being copied. I was about to start troubleshooting the drive itself, when I remembered that there was an update to VeraCrypt a couple of months ago, which seems about the time I noticed the slow down.

When I got the drive I encrypted it with AES(Twofish(Serpent)) and ran the initial full backup of about 3TB, I remember leaving it running over night and requiring another few hours to complete, so probably 10-12 hours.

Yesterday I deleted the partition and used just AES (hardware accelerated), and started the full backup a couple of hours before I went to bed. When I woke up this morning, after 10 hours it had only copied 180GB.