Extreme difference in backup & restore times

Thank you for any information you can provide.. please help..

-Been trying to sort out and test this software (WIN 7). It only takes 9 minutes to backup my C: partition (to external E-Sata drive), but took 4 hours 22 minutes to restore! Why such a difference? I suppose it has to uncompress the data to write it, but 29 times as long?? that seems crazy to me. Is there a way to overcome this?

-Also, when finished it would not boot, and a windows 7 boot manager black screen said there was a problem, to put in my win7 disk and choose 'repair'. I was worried at that point and didn't figure I had anything to lose, so did this and it repaired it (in a few seconds), and boots fine and everything looks good. I had read in the forum that I only needed to backup the C: partition and not the first track/MBR so I did not. Would it have booted if I had backed up/restored the first track/MBR along with the C: partition?

Thank you in advance.

 

The time to restore should be similar or less that the time needed to create the image. There is a problem somewhere.

Did you verify the image? The time to verify should be about 5 minutes. If it takes much longer, it could have a problem in the image or in the external disk.

You could also check both disks using chkdsk or a diagnostics program.

The restored image should boot without restoring the MBR.

 

Often the difference in times can be caused by the recovery environment being Linux and the drivers aren't as good or efficient for the hardware as the windows drivers. If your Paragon product has the WinPE option then you should try it since it is a Windows environment but it is not included in the free product. Try using a second internal HD if you have one or perhaps a different partition on the existing internal drive and see how it compares.

You may be having a disk problem where the backup archive is being restored and it is doing a lot of retries to read the data properly. I don't think this is as likely a cause as the driver issue.

 

Yes. In my answer, I implicitly supposed that both operations had been done in a Windows environment.

 

Thank You for all your help.

The archive did verify, and I believe the disks are fine. I'm not sure what exactly the reason was since I have not been able to reproduce it. All the tests I've done since then worked just as you said, with backup and restore times both low. I do remember it looking different, files moving across the screen like it was a file by file restore, and not like the ones afterward which just show a list of the basic steps and much faster.

I have other questions and issues but will address them in a separate post.

Thanks,
Jim D