Speedy Gonzales: How to speed up the critter.

In another thread, a poster asked whether a particular backup should take more than 24 hours.

It would be useful if Acronis stated the best way to speed up things.

Obviously, a faster drive/controller will help, as will more memory and a faster processer.

What about defragmentation of the source and destination drives?

Does this impact differently for a "files and folders" backup than for a drives backup?

I would guess that defragmentation of the source drives would have to help for a "files and folders" backup.

Does defragmentation help for a drives backup? In this case, TI might just be plopping the sectors onto the drive, after compression.

Defragmentation of the destination drive would help if done BEFORE a backup.

Acronis, any poop you can correct/add?

 

Hello Howard,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

I've consulted with the respective person from our Development Team and he assured me that defragmentation of the source hard drive migh increase the image creation speed only in case of creating a file-based backup or a disk\partition image of the disk\partition having a non-corrupted or supported file system. In case of imaging a disk\partition having a corrupted or non-supported file system (raw sector-by-sector imaging) disk defragmentation will not affect the image creation speed in any way.

Defragmentation of the destination hard drive may slightly increase the image creation speed. However, we do not expect this difference being noticeable.

Thank you.
--
Alexey Popov

 

As I understand it.

Defragmentation of the destination drive matters very much. If not defragmentated, there could be a significant performance hit.

If there is a supported file system, TI does NOT actually do a sector by sector backup even in a disk/Partition backup, and defragmentation matters.
But what if a partitition includes both supported and non-supported file systems? Indeed, TI could not even detect if there was a non-supported file system in addition to a supported file system.

But does the defragmention of the source matter for a FULL backup, as well as an incremental backup?

As I understand it, after a defragmentation of the source, the size of an incremental/differential backup would increase, perhaps, significantly.
Would a defragmentation of the source affect the speed of a FULL disk/partition backup?

 

“Would a defragmentation of the source affect the speed of a FULL disk/partition backup?”

I’m guessing that any decrease would be minimal. A fragmented file might cause the head to jump back AND forth to copy all the segments. But even with a highly fragmented disk, once TI determines the “in use” sectors, I would think that it would be a straight front-to-back copy – no jumping around.

 

THat is what I would expect, and I am currently in the midst of an experiment.
I've done the following thus far:

1. Used a special program to fragment a drive. Ended up with largest consecutive free space of about 1.85GB. This will force the backup to create a fragmented file.

2. Ran a FULL backup of all 3 internal hard drives. Time, including verify was 2:46:31.

3. Created a script to do an incremental backup. Ran the script. Time, including verify, was 1:38:47.

The times were very close to what I was experiencing in "normal" operations, i.e. without defragging the destination drive.

4. Used Perfect Disk to analyze the destination drive. After the full and incremental backups, there were an additional 84 excess fragments, I suspect in the fil e for the full bacxkup.

5. I deleted the TI files on the destination drive, and am now in the process of fully defragging the destination drive using Perfect Disk. I will then run the full and incremental backups. The source files will, for practical purposes, be the same (very little change).

My gut feeling, and I do have a large gut, is that there will be little, if any, change in the time used for the backup.

Oh well, defrag of USB drive is only 16% done, so it will be a while before I have results.

 

Interesting thread but how would you go about formatting a partition so that it contained two different files systems .

 

Not thru the normal Windows GUI.
All a program has to do is write the file system structures and make sure that ALL file systems keep track of the used sectors, so they do not clobber each other.

An example is optical media, which often has both ISO 9660 and ISO/IEC 13346 file systems.

 

OK, after doing the defrag of the destination drive, the full backup took 2:46:37, and the icremental took 1:38
;27, essentially unchanged from the case where the destination drive was extremely fragmented.

However, there's one more step in the experiment, but I'm not going to do it because I don't have the time.

When starting with the fragmented destination drive, after the full backup and incremental backup were done, there were 176 excess fragments.

When starting with the DEfragmented destination drive, after the full backup and incremental backup were done, there were 2 excess fragments.

The excess fragments would have to slow down subsequent incremental backups, but I don't have the time to go back and test.