Solution for Faster Acronis USB Drive Restores

Hi All,

Users are complaining about restoring from USB Drives taking so long to complete.

There is one solution that makes it restoring the operating system very fast.

Create a Dual-boot Hard Drive with your current operating system. How?

Use Acronis Disk Director Suite Version 10 to create a new partition on the Hard drive out of the existing partition using Free Space.

Once you have done that and committed, reboot and use the Windows CD to install a new copy of the existing operating system.

Once done and activated, install Acronis True Image into that operating system.

The operating system you install, must have a different Drive Letter than your current one, or the process will fail.

Then simple use Acronis to restore your primary operating system.

What would take 9 hours, will take about 2 to 3 hours from an USB Hard Drive.

The choice is yours.

Just giving out options.

 

Yes, this will work, and it may be even faster than what you suggest.

Of course, some people might not want to create another Windows installation, but f you are dual booting anyway, this is an added plus.

I've used this on systems that dual boot Vista and XP.

Another alternative is a BartPE or VistaPE boot disk which also run a Windows instead of Linux environment.

 

Hi John,

Actually how fast it really restores, depends on the Computer's Processor's Speed in Ghz and the amount of Physical Memory installed in the computer.

Also, it helps to disable your Anti-Virus Background Scanner during the Restore process.

 

I'm not sure I fully follow what you are saying. Do you have any explanation as to why your method is quicker ? I'm also having difficulty understanding how any restoration can take hours let alone 9 hours. I can restore C: in 5 or 6 minutes from any one of 5 or 6 different brands of external and this is using an old p4 with 512 mg of memory and a 75 gig hard drive. I'm just wondering if your method might show what system problem is causing such slowness ?

 

The size of the partition being restored also factors into how long it takes to restore. As well as how much data there is to restore.

Therefore each person / User is going to have a different experience on how long it takes to run to complete.

Are you restoring a Drive /partition Image or are you restoring a Selected Files Backup, when you post that it takes only 5 or 6 minutes to restore a 75 GB Hard Drive?

 

If you are talking about image creation and restores to USB drives the overall size of the partition does not make any real difference to the time taken. It is the used volume that makes a difference.
Even with a cranky old computer 1 GB of used space per minute should be an easy target to reach.
With more modern hardware 3 to 5 GB per minute is attainable.

My own experience with usb drive performance has been that image creation is always fastest when run from the Windows environment either by setting high priority or running them when the computer would otherwise be idling.
Restores, whether started from Windows or from the recovery CD, would take about three times as long as the creation process.
This was dramatically improved by running restores using Windows drivers from a BartPE plug in CD. Speed was improved to equal that of the creation process.
The next thing I tried was to mount the backup drive internally. Creation times were not much better but there was another step change in the restore time taken.

It had now reduced to about 2/3rds of the creation time and there was no need to use the Bart PE CD anymore.

So If anybody is not happy with restore speeds the first step would be to use a recovery cd that contains Windows drivers. This can be XP or Vista based.
If still not content get out a screwdriver and convert the USB drive to an internal one.
The security of having the images or for that matter the main drive "outside the box" can be made easy by using removable drive fittings.

Xpilot

 

Something I forgot to mention is compression when creating images and this also has an effect on restores.

The speed impact of using normal or high compression on a modern high speed computer is far less than that on a slower machine. However it is still noticable.

If speed is your thing get a bigger backup drive or manage with fewer images and turn off compression altogether.
On an elderly computer of mine the creation time halved when using no compression and the restore time went down in proportion.
The number of full drive images reduced from 11 or12 down to 8 or9. I considered this a worthwhile trade off.

Xpilot

 

I just can't relate to hours to do a restore. I use VistaPE with TI 11 plugin installed to a bootable hard drive partition and the whole process, including booting VistaPE, just takes a few minutes.

 

Just to chime in here, for years now I have used the bootable Linux-based recovery environment for backing up and restoring, and it has worked well for me. Normally I can achieve 1 GB/min when imaging one partition to another partition on the same disk, and 2 GB/min when imaging to a different disk.

However, I just finished converting my 3-yr old Dell desktop from XP to Vista. As I built the Vista system up I made frequent images so that if something went wrong I could drop back a step and troubleshoot. I did all of my imaging/restoration this time using TI 10 on VistaPE, and was able to achieve transfer speeds of 3 GB/min when imaging from an internal disk to an external USB hard disk. I was quite impressed that I could make a complete image of an 18 GB Vista C partition and all installed programs in about 6 minutes. Restoration took about 8 minutes.

Now I need to do what you've done, Earthling, and put a bootable VistaPE partition on my disks.

 

Hi All,

The operating systems are internally on either EIDE or SATA Hard Drives and the images are saved to external USB Hard Drives. The Images are compressed to save Space.

Accessing the USB Hard Drives to restore the Acronis Image to the Internal Hard Drive partitions is painfully slow from the Acronis Bootable Rescue CD.

Having two bootable Windows operating systems internally, makes restoring a breeze. Because you can use one operating system to restore the image to the other operating system's partition.

 

I still reckon if you were to use a Bart or Vista cd recovery environment it would be just as fast as the method you are using.
It would also have the advantage of being far more simple to set up and manage. It would also have the considerable advantage of having some element of your backup solution safely outside the computer box.

But as they say there are a thousand and one ways of cooking eggs... but do not keep all your supply in the same basket.

Xpilot

 

I love it.

 

Yeah I'm not getting the point here at all--what about a dual boot system is better than the Acronis boot disk, which loads everything you need and runs from RAM IIRC?

 

The boot disk uses Linux drivers and BartPE/VistaPE use Windows drivers to interact with the hardware. Windows drivers are often newer/better/faster.

 

Ah, I get it--is there somewhere here where it's described how best to set-up Bart w/ATI?

I do seem to have it somewhere as I recall it's used with a (different) file recovery program I bought.

nm I found some info--search term "mustang"...