Time taken to make Image

I recommended my friend to buy and install Acronis TI 11. I therefore feel responsible for the problem she is having.
It takes, on average 17 to 20 Hours to make an image of her C drive. Which uses 114.7 Gb. The image is written to an Internal "Caddy" drive.
I have uninstalled and reinstalled the program , It has made no difference.

She had Windows XP Sp3. Home. she had 1Gb Ram. CPU AMD Athlon 2400+.The computer is about 4 years old. It is slow compared to mine, but in my opinion, not bad.
Can anyone shed any light on what might be the problem please. Thanks. J

 

Please. Can anyone help me with this problem? I appreciate yoiur help. Thanks. J

 

This side of the pond is just waking up ... LOL.

Did she let it run for a good five or 10 min. to see if that time estimate corrected itself? The initial estimates are usually way too high.

Did she try the Backup using the Rescue CD?

 

Thank you very much for your reply. I am stating the actual time it took to make the image. She has it scheduled to make a full weekly backup . So no, she did not try to make the image using the disk, but within Windows. Thank you again for your help. Any further suggestions as to what the problem is? J

 

Try a manual backup with the Rescue CD to see if it takes the same time. This information might be helpful for others to provide a solution.

 

I will do this. But it may be some time before I can do this. Thanks again for your help. J

 

I have got my friend to make a backup using the TI disk. It still took 13 hours. I was wrong in saying initially that the used space on the HDD was 114.7 GB. It is actually only 53+ GB.
I have been looking at previous answers to this query and find that there is some connection with DMA and PIO. The drive in question (the one she is backing up to) is running in PIO mode but there is no way to change this.
Can anyone please help. Thanks. J

 

The Problem is the program itself! From my point of view the program is a joke! Even the support dont know whats going on and recommend silly thing.

Same problems appearing on my computer (new) on 3 differend operating systems (Vista home premium, business32 and ulimate x64).

With Acronis I'm unable to build an image of a drive with bigger database. From my experience bigger database (>100gb) Acronis TrueImage (V11 newest build) make silly things.

i.e.
1. need hours to backup and if the backup is verified system freeze.
2. no access to backup drive after system freeze and reboot, new format required
3. backupfile is empty or corrupted
4. it runs to nirvana and has to stop manually
5. it shows not the correct database - actually on the drive is 279gb but ATI came up with 469gb

I hope you understand my writings (well I'm German)

 

Thre's your problem. PIO is much slower since it doesn't allow the huge data transfers with low software overhead that Direct Memory Access allows. PIO doesn't use busmastering so that your drive controller can move data without going through the CPU.

Windows will sometimes fall back to PIO mode if it detects errors in strings when the device is accessed in DAM mode. For example, after the Windows IDE/ATAPI Port driver (Atapi.sys) receives a cumulative total of six timeout or CRC errors, the driver drops back the communications speed from the highest Direct Memory Access (DMA) mode to a lower DMA mode. It does this as long as it detects a problem and finally, if the driver continues to receive timeout or CRC errors, the driver eventually drops the transfer mode to the slowest mode, which is PIO.This is meant to keep the system running after some errors are detected.

I'd reboot and check out the drive for problems and then see if it can be reset to DMA mode. Windows won't automatically reset to DMA mode after resetting to PIO mode. To be able to reset to DMA mode is Widnows hs done a fall back to PIO mode, you will need to uninstall the driver for the IDE Channel. To do this, go to My Computer, System Properties, Hardware, Device Manager. Do not uninstall the drives themselves. Insteadm,. uninstall the primary and secondary IDE channel Drivers. Re-Boot your computer. This will revert you drive/drives back to DMA mode. You might need to reboot at this point. If Windows doesn't detect errors again, the drive will remain in DMA mode -- which is why it's improtant to check out the drive if you can.

It's also possible that all of your PC's DMA channels are used up but that is unlikely in most set-ups. Few modern devices require PIO to operate.

Another casue could be using a 40-pin cable on an IDE drive requiring an 80-pin cable.

Also, if you have hdrive and optical burner on the same cable, changing the order of the ddrives on the cable sometimes matters.

 

GFD. I must disagree with your comments. I would not have recommended it to my friend if it was " a Joke". I have been using the program for many years and find it invaluable. Thank you, anyway, for your input. J

 

shieber. Thank you very much for your help. I had a feeling, after reading other posts ,that this was the likely problem.
The only problem is that my friend says she cannot set the drive from PIO to DMA. She says there is no way to allow her to do this.No drop-dowm menu.
When you say check the drive for errors, how exactly can I do this.
My problem is, that I am not with her, yet, as I said earlier, I feel somewhat responsble recommending the program to her. Thanks again for your help. J

 

Many of us have been using ATI for years yet have found version 12/2009 and the dreaded version 11 to be, well, dreadful.

We only laugh to keep from crying. Indeed, even ver 11 and 12/2009 can perform some simple tasks well on some hardware, but the major bugs are well documented. I still find Ver 10 to be generally reliable in most respects although it doesn't work on a lot of the newer hardware that ver 12/2009 recognizes.

 

I'm new to Acronis therefore havent any experience. ATI causes Problems since the very first use end of last year. Acronis Germany is simply unable to help or is not willing to do. The new version 12 I tested (recommendation from support) causes exactly the same problems. They should aware of the postings and problemreports but I guess they dont. Dont know how it work under XP but does definately not work under 3 vista installation (Lenovo T61, FSC and a powermashine build be a local dealer) and that cannot be a hardware related problem.

I use 5 different usb drives (Maxtor and LaCie) and 6 internal SATA II drives (Samsung, Fuji, Maxtor, Seagate) and the problem occurs at any installation. Reinstalled ATi many times w/o any chance of behavior. I'm quite shure all user are betatester, either it works or not. In my case not!

Since I write this post ATI stays for hours to do a simple file backup (~270GB) and shows 1 day and 6 hours remindung. Again ATI will hold that status til tomorrow or longer exept I stop it manually.

I know many successfull user of ATI and thats the reason I bought it but they all using XP and not vista. It seems ATI run well with XP.

I admit simple task with small database will run well under vista.

BTW Acronis Disk Director is also a joke. I closed a requsest to Acronis because they are unable to solve a problem simply to merge two partition. Acronis support and DD failed!

 

shieber Sorry I asked such a stupid question. I have asked her to do a scandisk and let me know the results. Thanks again. J

 

GFD Thank you for your reply. I am sorry that you are having problems. J

 

Don't forget that the program may also be compressing data if you have that selected as an option. No telling how robust the Acronis compression algorithm is but it may be a bit slow. That can also be an issue with the processing capabilities of the computer itself.

I have run some experiments in the past as well as used other software (Norton Ghost) and my opinion is that True Image is comparatively slow. I have also had archives that validated upon creation not be restored when needed. That really ticked me off and caused me to stop using TI for some time. I switched to a software that copied data to an external drive and just did comparative updates. Unfortunately, any restoration of the PC meant I'd have to reinstall software, not just recover data, and so I returned to True Image for full hard drive backups.

One thing you may have your friend try is to take the data being archived and simply copy it to a folder in the location the archives are going. Just to compare how long it takes to COPY the data. It shouldn't take too long to copy 60GB of data.

However, check out the specs of the PC being used. My wife had a 1GHz Pentium III and 1GB RAM on her last computer that had USB 1.0 and transferring 70GB of data from the hard drive to a new iPod took overnight. On my computer, a 2.53GHz P4 with 2GB RAM and USB 2.0 could transfer all that data in less than an hour. Her computer was also 4 years old and quite slow.

So if it takes forever to simply copy the data, that's likely her issue, not necessarily True Image.

That's an opinion, mind you!

Good luck!

 

Hello badger,

Thank you for your interesting in Acronis True Image

Download free trial version of Acronis True Image Home 2009 and test it. Use this link to download free trial version of Acronis True Image Home 2009 it should work faster than previous versions.

In order to check disks for errors do the following:

- Go to the Command Prompt (Start -> Run -> cmd)
- Enter the command: "chkdsk DISK: /r" (where DISK is the partition letter you need to check) for every partition that is visible in My Computer. Please note, that checking the C: drive may require you to reboot the machine.

If the issue still persists contact Acronis support and submit technical request using this link or contact us via Live Chat describe the issue and provide the following info:

Could you please download Acronis Report utility available at http://download.acronis.com/support/AcronisReport.exe and run it, create a report and send it to us? Please compress the Acronis Report output file into an archive (e.g. with WinZip) and attach to your message by browsing for the archive. This would provide us with detailed information on the hard disk partition structure.

Best regards,
--
Dmitry Nikolaev