Speed of "recovery" when booted from Rescue Media?

I figured out how to use the "Rescue Media" CD to make an image of my hard disk (10G) to external drive, then put a new HD (80G) in my computer and restore that image to the entire 80G partition. Worked fine.

However, the speed of recovery was 2.5-3x as long as if I had just recovered the 10G partition (which would have left me with a 70G unallocated space partition) -- 4:40 to recover the 10G image to a 10/70 split -- 11:21 minutes to recover the image to one 80G partition.

My experience using Norton Ghost is that -- when booted from the Ghost CD -- is that there's no speed drop when restoring "to partition" vs. "to disk".

Anybody have any thoughts why TI Home 9 (current build) is taking so much longer to copy the backed up image to an entire partition? Just curious...

 

Hello stevemaser,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response.

Please note that time needed for restore depends on the used space, the performance of the system and drivers loaded. Since Acronis True Image Bootable CD is Linux based the drivers may not be optimized for your particular hardware and therefore the backup/restpre operations may take much time in standalone mode of Acronis True Image (when booted from Acronis True Image Bootable CD) than in Windows mode. We recommend that you first try to restore data running Acronis True Image under Windows, because this method provides more functionality.

Please also note that Acronis True Image has ability to resize the partition during the restoration (Chapter 6.3.8 "Changing the restored partition size and location" in the Acronis True Image 9.0 Home User's Guide).

Thank you.
--
Aleksandr Isakov

 

I used to find exactly the same kind of time taken differences when using an external drive. While the Acronis explanation is accurate they do not appear to be in a rush to provide better Linux drivers for external drives. I have now changed and keep images on a slave drive. Creation times are about the same but restore times are much faster. They only take a third of the imaging time.
The main thing however is that regardless of the time taken the process still works !

 

I have noted this problem too.
I checked it out yesterday and an image in windows takes about 11 mins on my system.

Do it again in Bootable CD media and it is about 12 to the same disk or 16 to a partition on the system disk.

Do it to a USB external (my prefered choice for dumps) and it takes 58 minutes in DOS and 15 in Windies.

I made afresh copy of the Unix CD as I understand there is some differences in the 3677 build of TI. (I have just brought mine up to date)

I note the Acronis response that drivers are not optimised in the Unix/DOS version but this is a shocking admision. If not why not.
Do you really trust your system to back up only under windows?
What happens if you ever need to do a full recovery from external media?
I had a full failure on my system disk recently and it was an hour to do a recovery to a new disk.

Can Acronis deal with this issue.
It is a pain.

Regards

Roger

 

Hello roger11,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response.

Please note that each new build brings such improvements as better hardware support and includes new drivers for a wide variety of devices. The drivers for the devises update constantly and we try to include the most recent drivers into the standalone version of Acronis True Image.

Please note that this issue may be connected not only with the USB drivers, therefore, if you would like to investigate it please create Windows System Information and Linux system information (sysinfo.txt) using latest build 3677 of Acronis True Image 9.0 Home as it is described in Acronis Help Post. Then submit a request for technical support. Attach all the collected files to your request. We will investigate the issue and try to provide you with the solution.

Thank you.
--
Aleksandr Isakov

 

My solution to this is to build a BartPe CD http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ and use one of Mustang's plugins http://www.mechrest.com/plugins/.
By using BartPe you are using Windows drivers and not Linux. This issue appears constantly and I don't see how Acronis will ever solve it satisfactorily. You can also use the Acronis plugin for BartPe which is included in the current builds.

 

My cure for this particular headache was to stop bashing my head against the wall !
Ever since version 8 the performance, when booting from the Acronis CD to restore from a USB image, has been very poor, though it has worked. The first solution I tried was to use a Bart PE CD with TI plugin. This greatly improved things but I maintain it should not have been necessary. There is nothing odd about my hardware. I use the provided standard Microsoft USB drivers with nothing extra for the USB drives, they are strictly plug and play. Three Different USB drives and two different PCI controllers have been used and all gave the same results.
My final solution has been to give up on USB drives altogether and to image to and restore from an internal slave drive. This is the fastest and most reliable method I have found. It is topped off by always restoring to a swappable main drive so it is not only fast it is also failsafe.

 

I also image to a secondary hard drive not external. I prefer the BartPe approach because my desktop will only work with the Safe Version on the TI Rescue CD. I just update the Mustang plugin and rebuild the CD as needed when the TI build level changes.