Restore of image backup is painfully slow

I'm sorry if this has been asked and answered before but I couldn't find an answer to this.

True Image Workstation 9.1 build 3,718. Windows XP Pro w/SP2 fully patched. I do an image backup to a External USB HD of a 60gb HD on a laptop. This takes approximately 30min. I then go out and reinstall windows but then I want to go back to the old image. So I boot up with the recovery CD and start the restore of the image from the USB HD. The restore takes 9 - 10 hours to restore the image. Wow...please tell me I'm missing something.......

Jeff Pitsch

 

TI may have a poor driver for your USB device. The only way to get a better one is log a support call with TI and they will provide you with a new .iso boot CD. You can't add drivers to the rescue CD environment yourself.

Create the BartPE rescue CD. It uses Windows drivers and should give you decent speed if it is a drivers issue. The TI plug-in for BartPE is included in your distribution file but you have to do a Complete (or something like that) to get it loaded onto your HD in the Acronis folder.

 

Obviously restore times will vary but your's are far too long. My own experience is that restores take less than half the creation time. However this is to an internal drive. Restores from an external drive can be nearly as fast. The workaround is to start your restore from a Bart PE CD with the appropriate TI plugin. This will use your normal Windows drivers and you will see a great improvement.

 

thank you very much. BartPE did the trick. Down to about 1/2 hour for restore.

Jeff Pitsch

 

Try doing a clone instead. Using the boot disk and an external USB drive I get a complete mirror image of my C drive 30 gigs in 12 minutes. The clone option is not just for migrating to a new machine!

 

What a waste of the external hard drive that means he can't store anything else there

 

This is total bs. Where the hell are the Acronis support people on this issue? My restore from USB now takes over 8 hours using version 9 when the same thing took under an hour with version 8.

<snip>

removed editorial - Detox

 

Hello wtsitmn,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response.

If you encounter speed problems while creating, restoring or validating backups in Acronis Rescue Environment, i.e. when computer is booted from Bootable Rescue CD or Acronis Startup Recovery Manager is used, please follow the instructions provided in this previous post of mine.

Thank you.
--
Alexey Popov

 

Hello Alexey.

I'm concerned that your official reply in this thread (as well as in others) is seen simply as a delaying or avoidance tactic, inasmuchas your "previous post" simply says to update the TI software and report a problem.

I too am now on my 7th hour of a restore with the software reporting that it needs another 7 hours to finish. There is no information other than that "Operation 1 of 2" is being conducted, to indicate what is going on beneath the covers. For all I know, the software has entered an endless loop! In fact, the package earlier reported (4 hours ago) that only 2 more hours were required. The "total progress" bar moves back and forth around the midpoint with every "current operation".

The package apparently has a serious problem that is not being tackled in any aggressive way by the company. And the tech support that is advertised pre-sale as being 24 x 7 by email, phone and whatnot apparently doesn't *really* exist for your standard customers. 24 x 7 is NOT the same as "48-hour" lackluster response, which is what one apparently is going to receive.

A support request from me 16 hours ago has not even received the courtesy of a "got your request" response, let alone tech support actually addressing an issue. Is that really a fulfillment of the promise that "whatever tasks or problems you have to solve, you will always find an answer on these pages, or get it from our support team 7 days a week"?

I am absolutely sure that packages such as Acronis' are extraordinarily complicated to architect, test and debug. Nonetheless there is no excuse for not providing a workable product with rapid response to problems.

Yours.

p.s. Restore now reports that the hours remaining has climbed to 8 hours!

 

Hello Mel,

Thank you for your interest in Acronis Disk Backup Software.

First of all, please be aware that my previous post not only says to update the software and report a problem, but also provides the explanation of the possible reasons, suggests a workaraound and only after that recommends providing our Support Team with the corresponding information so that we can investigate the problem and provide you with a solution.

As far as I understand, you have already submitted a request for technical support, but received no other reply than the automatic one. Could you please let us know your Acronis request # (e.g. [Acronis #123456]) which was sent to you in the autoreply to your letter? We will find out the reason for the delay. If my assumption is not correct and you have not received the autoreply then please send us a Private Message containing your e-mail address.

Thank you.
--
Alexey Popov

 

My experience is that they take longer. But there are a lot of variables involved. But hey shouldn't take many several times longer.

sh

 

I have just found that my image copy of my laptop from a 40GB HDD to a new 100GB is taking 12-15 hours. It is on my recent HP laptop which shouldn't contain any unusual hardware.
I am using TI WS 9.1 build 3718.
Note that an earlier copy onto a 40GB using earlier builds worked okay.
AND NOTE that I had EXACTLY the same problem 1-2 years ago and I had to wait until a new build came out that fixed the problem. So it appears that an old problem has resurfaced. Just when I was getting comfortable again using TI after too many issues in the past, AND just when I am trying to get workmates to start using TI.
Turning on acpi=off just kills all my USB (where the image to be restored lives) but booting into safe mode does allow me to proceed further - just now get the message that my archive is corrupted. As a backup system this is all pathetic. I don't believe that my archive is corrupt so I might just go back and do the image copy from within Windows.

 

As from my previous email I decided, out of curiosity, to do an archive verify just to see if my archive really is corrupt. However I am aborting that now that it tells me that it will take 2 DAYS !!!!!!!!!!
There is an issue, possibly with USB, that is affecting a lot of people. I suspect that there are way more people out there that have the same problem but until you have to do a restore you don't know you have it. This is very scary stuff !
I will try a restore from the image backup under Windows onto my new hard drive mounted externally to see if that effects a solution. Other wise I will go back to an earlier version to see if that resolves the problem.

Acronis needs to fix this one fast, they have had it before.

I have wasted literally days now and in the past over this one problem. The first time round I spent months trying to get problems solved with USB. I flagged TI for about 9 months after that.
Second pass didn't take long, after yet another upgrade, for the same problem to come back. This was fixed by a quick upgrade (took a couple of months during which I fell back to using Ghost).
And now after purchasing WS 9.1 and thinking everythings great and they have got their act together I hit the same problem a third time round.

Get rid of this Linux thing, I can accept a longer load time as long as it works and lets me do a restore. I just hope I haven't deleted my earlier builds. Downloading 150Mb per time, trying to write floppies on a floppyless laptop etc just doesn't work for me. I might have to delve into BartPE yet if I can find the time.

Of and one more thing. I don't know where the company is actually registered or based (US or outside) but whatever they do I just hope we don't get the American bullshit where they deny everything because of liability and thus making everybody waste all their time because the company cannot tell the truth. I get enough of this from large American companies without Acronis joining in. Entry web page, large entry, easy not to miss - new build fixes slow restore time from recovery CD.

Enough ranting - ll see if I can get something up and running.

 

Well I've sucessfully screwed my 40GB bootable disk as well through trying to restore the OS from my USB drive to my 100GB attached thru a SATA PC Card port. Instead of just creating a copy of the C: drive on the new 100GB it seemed to amalgate itself with the onboard HDD as well. So the onboard drive has become drive E: and the remote attached disk has changed to C: and neither will boot seperately but it will boot if both disks are present.

Fortunately I have the most recent backup done earlier today and another done a few days ago so it is back to using a "much" earlier build of WS 9.1 to see if this works.

I will, of course, copy off both backups and store them on another PC first so that TI can't "seek and destroy" them.

deja vu

 

Just going back from build 3718 to 3534 to give it a go. I note that I am getting an error IDE2: Ports already in use, skipping probe. I have never seen this before excepot with these two builds.
The 40GB HDD (7200rpm) in my laptop isn't the original and I had no trouble with creating it from the original 40GB (5400rpm) so this (these) errors are recent. ie the hardware hasn't changed but TI most definitely has.

Nope. Loading the full package with USB drivers etc) doesn't find the USB attached hard drive. Now the interesting thing is if I load up TI in Safe mode (where they state there is no support for USB) I can actually see and read from the USB drive.

I will have to see if I have a copy of an earlier version 9.1 build at home and try again.

Or even go back to version 8 !!

 

Unfortunately you get only one backup per destination disk. HDs are rather inexpensive thises days but if your backup regimen calls for a series of say, 10 or 30 backups before overwriting, then using clone instead of crating image files can get kind of pricey -- also takes up a lot more physical space.

 

Just in case anyone was following my story above I have finally managed to transfer everything over to my 100GB new HDD. Absolutely nothing changed except that it was done several hours later at home using build 3534. This time it worked. Sometimes waiting several hours or even a day makes all the difference. I was just about ready to accept that I had a hardware failure.
I am still suspicious of build 3718 and will test this further later (once I replace my main home PC since that fell over permanently while the laptop drama was going on).
You might note that although an image format is apparently the same over different versions and backwards compatible it isn't forward compatible. I couldn't read my images using V9 - just got invalid format or something.

On to the next problem.