Does size matter?

I just upgraded the two hard drives I back up with Acronis 11. They are about twice as large now, although they contain the same amount of data as before, just a lot more unused space.

Backups are taking A LOT long now, even the differentials run as a test right after a full backup. My question is, does size matter. Will the backup (I am running complete partition backups, not file backups) take longer if the disk is bigger or does Acronis 11 take into account that most of the disk is unused space?

Thanks!!!!

 

Check the BIOS settings to confirm that the new drives are set up for fast input / output.

Larger drives should take a bit longer since TI has to check more sectors for data, but new drives are generally faster than old drives for the same quality level and rotation speed.

Check the buffer sizes on the new vs. old drives. Some cheaper large drives only have 2 - 8 MB of buffer vs. 16 - 32 MB that some older drives provide. That will affect speed.

 

New drives are literally twice as fast. SataII instead of sata and 16mb caches instead of 8mb. They're setup correctly in the bios. I think something else must be going on.

 

Are you imaging in Windows or by booting the TI CD?

In spite of the 1.5Mb/s vs 3.0 Mb/s numbers and the larger cache, the speed of the new drives in real-life is not greatly different.

 

Backing up while Windows XP is running. The drives are definitely faster, but that's not really the issue. I wasn't looking for backup times to dramatically decrease, but I didn't expect the differentials to take 10 times longer.

I just finished a differential and it's almost as large as the full backup, very interesting. I haven't fragmented in between as I know that can cause similar behavior.

So, the reason the differentials are taking so long is because it looks like it's re imaging practically the whole drive.

I may try to uninstall and reinstall Acronis TrueImage. Maybe something happened when I installed the new C: drive.

Any other thoughts or things I should be looking at?

 

If you make a new Full backup, is the Differential backup still large? It's possible that the Windows installation/restore on the new drive hasn't stablized yet (stuff is still moving around). XP usually isn't a bad as Vista in this area.

Also, are you creating a Differential backup based on a Full image created from the new drive or one based on a previous Full based on the old drive? If it's based on the old drive or you haven't created a new Full since the restore to the new drive, the Differential backup will be practically a Full backup in size.

 

OK. I completely uninstalled and reinstalled TrueImage 11 (restarting after both steps). I deleted the old backups and am now imaging a new full backup on the new drive. Probably won't get to the differential till tomorrow, but we'll see if this fixes the problem.

 

Just want to close this out by saying that the uninstall and reinstall of Trueimage seemed to fix the problem. Ran a full backup and then immediately ran a differential. It ran fast and was very small.

I don't think this was a Trueimage problem, I think something happened when I installed a new boot drive.

Thanks for all the help!

 

Thanks for posting the resolution of the problem.