How long backup and Restore different compression

[Woody Splawn]

I am using Acronis True Image Home Version 9.0

I did a backup and restore recently. This was on a 93 gigabite drive. It had 34.2 Gig used. after the restore the .tib file size was about 21 GB. I did the backup at the highest compression rating. It took about two hours to backup.

What surprised me, however, was the amount of time it took to restore; about 5 hours.

If I had done the backup at the lowest level of compression would it have made much of a difference in time (Particularly restore time)? Is there a white paper somewhere that will give me some idea of what to expect with regard to backup and restore times.

Thank You

[seekforever]

Don't know about a white paper but:
(These estimates are very rough. Actual times depends on the hardware and the phases of the moon!)
In Windows, if you are saving to an internal drive a very rough rule-of-thumb is that it takes about 1 minute per normally compressed Gb of output file. I might guess that a normally compressed file for your case would have been around 26GB so it would have taken that many minutes. If it were validated it would roughly double the time.

If you are backing up to a USB drive then it will be around 1.5-2X slower.

If you were doing it with the TI boot CD which is Linux you can usually figure on about 1.5-3 times longer.

If you did the backup in Windows I'm surprised it took that long. Try Normal compression and see if it helps. You don't lose all that much compression. This will likely show more improvement in speed if you have a slow processor.

Even if you start the restore in Windows, the actual environment that is started on the reboot is Linux. The long restore times are often caused by a poorly optimized driver for your hardware. If you did the backup to USB try making it to an internal drive. You can do this even if you only have one partition if there is enough free space - ignore the warning message. (you could not use this archive to restore though).

[shieber]

I've seen this happen on laptops, the restore time is several times slower than the backup speed. I suspect that what is happening is that the ATI BootCd is treating the external drive as a USB 1.1 instead of 2, which runs many times slower than USB 2.

[Acronis Support]

Hello Woody Splawn,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/).

Could you please clarify if the restore operation was performed in Windows (without reboot), or in Acronis Linux (reboot at the start of restore, or Acronis Bootable Rescue Media) environment?

seekforever gave a good estimation of times, though higher compression level can significally affect that.

Please also notice that Acronis True Image 9.0 Home is pretty old version, and its Linux drivers might not support modern hardware too well, so, as shieber pointed, drives could be working slower than in Windows.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov

[Brigette]

I have TI 10, build 4942. I'm running Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. I have a Dell XPS710 with Core 2 Duo Processors @2.66ghz and 2gb RAM. Restoring to a SATA 500gb internal hard drive from an external USB 2. I just did test file restores of 9.47gbs of data under Windows and then using the Acronis boot CD. Both restores were with pre-validation:

Under windows, time was 1 hr 19 mins (pre-validation is 1hr 10 mins and restore was 9 mins). Using the boot CD (Acronis Linux environment) it took 8 hrs 9 mins (7hrs 16 mins validation, 53 mins restore). Both file restores were from a Full image (no differentials/incrementals). This is a problem because a full restore of my data would be 103gbs and with these numbers I estimate it would take around 17 hours to restore using the boot CD, assuming 7 hrs 16 mins to validate and the restore being approximately 9hrs 30 mins.

My backups of 103gb of data (always with pre-validation) in Windows are 2hrs 24 mins (with normal priority & compression). That is great, especially being done at 2AM. I put Acronis Support on notice of my issue. Is it time for a BartPE cd? Has the creation/use of a BartPE cd dramatically improved restore time for others with this issue?

[Xpilot]

I get maximum imaging and restore speeds by following these rules.
1.Backup in Windows. Restore from CD.
2.Use internal drives.
3.Use less or no compression. Backup times are less with no compression, particularly if the source contains a high proportion of already compressed data. Restores slightly faster.
4. I do not run validations.
5. Schedule backups to run when the computer would be idle. Unattended backups run faster whatever the priority set. in one sense it does not matter how long an unattended backup takes as long as it has finished when you get back ;) .

When I used external USB drives, imaging from Windows was nearly as fast as to an internal drive but restores were much slower. Using a Bart PE CD greatly improved restore times ( nearly as good as using an internal drive).

Xpilot

[Brigette]

My apologies to you, Woody. My problem is similiar and I barged into your thread. I probably should have started a new one.

[Menorcaman]

-{ Quote: "My apologies to you, Woody. My problem is similiar and I barged into your thread. I probably should have started a new one." }-Hello Brigette,

You're right. I've split your posts to a new thread titled Problem Creating BartPE + TI Plugin (http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=192514).

Regards

Menorcaman

[Brigette]

Thank you, Menorcaman. Apologies again, Woody.