Backup to USB works but to NAS fails

I'm the volunteer, untrained, administrator for my church and its Win
2003 SBS server that backs up using ntbackup to an attached external
USB drive in about 4 1/2 hours for 40GB. I'd like to use a NAS drive
located in another part of the building in order to have a little
disaster protection. But when I try pointing to the NAS drive the
backup hasn't finished in 12 hours. I'm trying to figure out why. We
supposedly have a 100 Mbps Ethernet network. Between the server and
the NAS drive are three switches/hubs (I'm not sure of the
difference).

My guess as to what is going on is this. USB 2.0 pumps data at about
400 Mbps which is four times faster than our Ethernet. Consequently
the backup via Ethernet should take 4 times as long, or about 17
hours. Am I understanding networking speeds correctly?

Another person on my computer committee is guessing that the people
that put in the cabling cut corners and the network is only running at
10 Mbps. Is there an easy way to measure the speed? Could I simply
connect a laptop to the NAS end of the cable and ping the server? How
would the ping time translate to network speed? Is there some other
free tool that I could use?

I've had a suggestion that we upgrade at least the cable between the
server and the NAS to gigabit Ethernet. How hard and expensive is
that? My guess is that I'd need to add a Gb network card to the server
and run another cable. Would a CAT5 cable be adequate or do I need
CAT5e or CAT6?

I'm looking at some interim solutions of splitting the backup into
parts. Doing the C: drive on one day and the D: drive on another
(about 20GB each) and only doing the full backup once every week or
two with incremental or differentials the rest of the time. Which
would you recommend? Incremental or differential?

Do you have any other suggestions on how I can get this working?

Another part of the problem is that when the backup hasn't finished
and the users try starting up their workstations, they cannot access
anything on the server, including file shares or the Internet. If I
cancel the backup the users still cannot access anything until I
reboot the server. Does ntbackup disable all access until it
successfully completes?

Thank you in advance from this overworked and underpaid volunteer.
Brian


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Relevant Pages

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