My university teacher showed us Acronis for the first time a long time ago. I paid him a visit to wish him a Happy New Year, so he uses Macrium v6 on Windows 10, and is very happy with it.
I always restore after a system crash (e.g., blue screen, power outage, etc.) just in case a file was corrupted. It's easy enough to do with Macrium Reflect. Regarding RDR, what is the best practice in this situation. Leave RDR on or do a full (standard) image restore?
My full backups have gone from 30 minutes to over 1.5 hours on my laptop and from 15 minutes to around 45 minutes on my desktop PC.
Did anything change in between the before/after elapsed times? Reflect upgrade? When I added verification it doubled the image time.
I'm experiencing similar degraded performance after upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 11 and updating Intel RST drivers. Did you change anything (major) to your setup?
Do you use Intel RST drivers? If so, which version? I upgraded them 17.11 (those were the first mentioning Windows 11 in the release notes), which may also be the cause of my performance issue?
That would leave your previous installation’s Windows folder on the disk, which would of course increase the amount of data to be backed up. Did you take a basic look at the logs of the jobs you’re talking about to see if there are any notable differences between the faster job and the slower job on each PC, such as the amount of data on each source partition being backed up? Just saying, “A recent backup took a lot longer than a previous backup” doesn’t really provide much to work with. If the leftover Windows folder doesn’t account for this, I’ve also seen cases where a significantly longer backup time was the result of the user unwittingly including unwanted additional partitions or entire additional disks in the backup job that took longer than they expected. That is also something that would be apparent from a quick look at a job log.
I frequently backup to 2 SSD USB drives, and monthly to 2 USB standard drives. Sometimes with standard drives the backup starts very slow, time projection to complete the task runs into hours whereas a full backup usually takes 8-9 minutes (about 100 GB). When that happens, I cancel the backup, reboot my computer, and start the backup anew with the expected speed. Why is it happening (1 out of 10 backups) I don't know, but restarting the procedure always works.
Windows.old has been removed. Very strange. I just checked the logs on my desktop PC and it looks like there is about 20GB (95.64GB) more data on my drive and it took 00:29:38. The last time the backup took less than 20 minutes it had 75.26GB, so where has the extra 20 GB come from? I think I just answered that.
Mount the Windows partition from each backup at the same time and then open two instances of a folder size mapping application, such as TreeSize Free. Have one instance analyze each mounted disk. That should make it pretty clear pretty quickly where the discrepancies are.
I was just about to suggest the same method. Run TreeSize on each mounted partition. (mounted from your backup images)
View each TreeSize side by side on your monitor and gradually compare folder sizes. Start with the major folders. Program Files, Windows, etc.
The way you graduate from being a newbie is by taking information you receive and building on it with your own research to find answers rather than just waiting for people to hand everything to you. Reflect's documentation is better than most, and it’s meant to be read by people who need to learn how to do things, including how to mount or "browse" an image backup so that the partition(s) of interest in a backup can appear within Windows Explorer like an external hard drive with its own drive letter. You can mount partitions out of multiple backups simultaneously. So for example you'd mount the version of your C drive contained in Backup #1 as Drive E (or whatever) and the version of your C drive contained in Backup #2 as Drive F. Now you have those two versions of your C partition available on your system simultaneously. Then you download TreeSize Free. Launch two different instances of it, just as you can launch multiple instances of an application like Notepad simultaneously. Tell one instance to analyze your E drive (i.e. the version of your C drive from Backup #1) and the other instance to analyze your F drive (the version of your C drive from Backup #2). Put those TreeSize windows side by side, and you'll quickly be able to see which folders are different sizes, and then drill down into those folders to find the specific subfolders or files that create those differences.