43 hours to clone 133 GB??

I got True Image mainly so I could copy my hard drive (currently containing 133 GB of data) to a 250 GB WD Passport (USB) drive and have files immediately available and with me when I travel. But after 6 hours, it was only 14% of the way finished with a clone operation. Extrapolating, it looks like it would take 42 hours to clone the drive.

I was able to copy the drive to a 160 GB Passport drive overnight using the same setup and USB port with Norton Ghost. But Ghost won't recognize the 250 GB drive, which is why I got True Image. True Image recognizes the drive, but the copy speed of around 56 MB/minute is prohibitively slow. I can't afford to disable my computer for over two days each time I want to make a copy.

I'm using True Image 11, build 8053. Computer is a 2.4 GHz Pentium IV with 1 GB RAM, running up-to-date XP SP2. The USB port is 2.0, no hub. Is this normal copy speed for True Image?

 

nom de TI,

Do you have any large files? For example 1 GB vob files? Or anything over 50 MB.

How long does it take to just copy and paste around 1000 MB of large files from the internal to the external HD.

Let us know the MB amount and the time.

 

If the PC has a setting in BIOS for legacy USB, try setting that to Off, boot up and try ATI again. Sometimes, that makes a diff in how fast ATI can write to a USB drive. It's like, on some machines, ATI will treat a usb drive as USB 1.1 if you give it half a chance. Anyhow, it's an easy thing to try.

 

Thanks for the response. I do have five 1.68 GB and two 4.13 GB files on my drive. It took right at 30 minutes to copy the 1.68 GB file in Windows from the main drive to the 250 GB USB drive. Don't know whether it's significant or coincidence, but this is just about exactly the average copy speed of the True Image clone process.

I also checked the copy time for the same file to the 160 GB USB drive to see if there's any significant difference between it and the 250 GB drive. There wasn't. Last night I successfully backed up the main hard drive to the 160 GB USB drive using Norton Ghost (DOS type Ghost 2002). Total time was just about exactly four hours. So apparently it's gaining a lot of speed by reverting to DOS operation. I was expecting similar speed from True Image. Is it operating in Windows with background processes running?

 

You say you want to have your files immediately available to you when you travel. I take it then that these are simply data and not programs. If that is the case then I would just use Windows Explorer to copy the files over to the portable drive. If you want some measure of compression, use the built-in WinZip in Windows or WinRar.

If you use True Image, in my opinion, those files are not going to be "immediately" available when you need them.

 

Thanks for the tip. Unfortunately it didn't make any noticeable difference.

 

So you're suggesting that True Image isn't capable of cloning a USB drive in a reasonable time and I should just forget trying to use it? That's what I'm afraid of, but was hoping it would do what it seemed to be advertised to do.

That's certainly not very encouraging. Every other time I've cloned a USB drive, the entire directory structure with all files are available just as they are on any other drive, shortly after I connect it to the USB port. So apparently True Image doesn't really clone a drive when requested but makes some kind of mangled copy?

 

nom de TI,

Let's say 1700 MB in 1800 seconds. That is 1 MB/second which is USB 1 speed. USB 2 speed is around 25 MB/second.

But now you need to see if you have a slow HD as the problem rather than a USB problem. Download HDTune http://www.hdtune.com/hdtune_254.zip

Unzip and double click the exe. Select your internal HD and click Start. Record the Maximum Transfer Rate. Now do the same for your external HD. What are the results?

If your internal HD is in PIO mode instead of DMA mode you can see similar speeds. Have a look in Device Manager, Primary IDE channel, Advanced Setting. Is the Current Transfer Mode DMA or PIO?

 

Well, like I said, not using TI for the purpose you stated was just my opinion. TI is very good for making whole disc backups or clones. For just data, my preference, by far, is to use Windows Explorer. But if TI works for you in that situation then to each his own.

 

I haven't run the hard drive checks, but your comment about the USB speeds was the clue I needed. Ghost uses its own DOS USB drivers, while from the discussion here I've gathered that True Image is using the Windows drivers. I went into the device manager and updated the drivers for the USB ports. They're Intel devices and had Intel drivers, and the update installed slightly later Microsoft drivers. Presto! The 1.68 GB file copies to the 250 GB USB drive in 4 minutes flat instead of the 30 minutes it took before. If the True Image clone speed increases in proportion, it should do the job in about 5.6 hours, which is entirely acceptable.

My machine has been updated many times, preserving the same hard drive. (I realize this isn't generally a good idea -- for reasons like this --, but I've got nearly 200 applications on my machine, so reinstalling and updating all of them and resetting all the options would be a monstrous task.) My guess is that the drivers I was using were left over from the previous machine which had USB 1.1 ports, but were compatible with the new hardware and never got updated. It's interesting that my old machine with USB 1.1 ports pops up a message every time I plug in a flash drive telling me how everything would go faster with USB 2.0. My current machine never showed that message, apparently because the ports are USB 2.0, even though the drivers were limiting them to USB 1.1 speed.

I'll try a clone tonight and report the result tomorrow. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to help. Maybe this will help someone else in the future.

 

Good work.

I'd still use HDTune and check your DMA mode because even at 7 MB/sec, it's only a third to a quarter of what you should be getting.

 

I don't see any mention of you using the Acronis emergency disk ? It will only take a few minutes to burn a CD and the try it out. It may or may not help but if you are willing to waste a CD and a few minutes it would be interesting to see how things work without using windows at all.

 

HDTune shows 47.7 MB/s average for the main hard drive and 29.2 MB/s average for the 250 GB USB drive. The main drive is running UDMA mode 5.

I was able to update the USB drive driver. There was no significant change to the HDTune results. But I did several copy operations and found the time to copy the 1.68 GB file is now down to just about 2 minutes. I don't know if this is due to the new driver, or if maybe Windows was just busy with other things when I ran the earlier test. I'm guessing that I should expect something like 1/(1/47.7 + 1/29.2) MB/s for the copy process, which works out to about 18 MB/s. At 2 minutes for the 1.68 GB file I'm getting 14 MB/s. So at least I'm in the ballpark now.

Thanks for all the help!

 

I just had a look at my USB external HD with HDTune. A little less than yours at 25.9 Mb/sec. My copy/paste rate for large files from internal to external HD is 23 MB/sec.

I'm glad you are on top of the problem.

 

Hello nom de TI,

Glad to read that your clone speeds have improved.
You may not have realised yet that you now have the perfect tool to renew your ageing internal hard drive. This could be done now or left till the old drive shows signs of imminent demise.
You now have, or soon will have, a clone of your main drive. The next step could be to remove the existing drive, replace it with your clone and the job is done. No re-installation of anything. Just boot up and go.

From my own point of view, to match your data transport requirements, I would not use the cloning method. The disadvantage is that, relative to some other ways, it is overkill to replicate the whole content of your hard drive. Each time you need to update the external drive you have to run the whole process again. It would be far better IMHO to use a copy/synchronisation program. Then after the inital copy of the required files further updates of the external drive would only be for changes and not the whole caboodle.

There are plenty of good programs that do the job indeed some are free and are perfect for what is required.
You could then dedicate TI to backup your computer on regular basis using its imaging process. My own hard drive is backed up automatically on a daily basis using TI in its imaging mode.

Xpilot

 

Thanks for the advice, but everyone's requirements are different. With a couple of hundred applications on my drive, I find the easiest way to maintain backups is to periodically either clone or image my entire drive. I use InClose MobileDocks for my hard drives, so when I want to clone or image the drive I simply plug the target drive in. A backup is easily done overnight, so there's no advantage to fussing with partial backups or trying to sort data files from program files. Hard drives are cheap these days, and I've accumulated a pretty good pile of them. Of course I make additional and frequent backups of critical data to a variety of media.

I've found the USB 160 and 250 MB WD Passport drives to be very useful when I travel. They're very small and, even though I synchronize many of my hard drive files onto the laptop before I go, there's always a chance that I missed some obscure file. Having a full clone of my hard drive along assures me that any file is easily available. It also allows me to have a full, up to date backup of my home system with me in case of theft or disaster while I'm gone.

I don't tend to swap main drives very often because of the nuisance of having the operating system and some applications recognize the change and require re-validation. I generally do it only when I've outgrown a drive, which happens often enough. I back up frequently enough that a hard drive failure won't set me back too badly.

I'm sure this arrangement wouldn't suit your purposes. But it suits me very well. The only problem with it was making the clone onto the 250 GB USB drive, which I've now solved.

 

I am indeed. Full clone in 2:35! That's a 16X improvement, thanks to your patience and all your help. Thanks very much!

 

Although the conventional method is now working just fine, I'll give the emergency disk a try after a while just out of curiosity. Thanks for the suggestion.

 

A clone of the hard drive (133 GB of data) to the USB drive took just about 1-1/2 hours using the recovery disk program. Amazing! I'll use that method when I'm in a hurry. Thanks for the tip!

 

That's 26 MB/sec. Full speed ahead!