How long should a restore actually take to get started?

Hiya,

I'm using True Image Echo Server for Windows 11.

Have a backup of an SBS server that I want to restore to a new machine, with Universal Restore.

The bootable media I had didn't recognise the drives. Apparently SATA drives cause probs, and I had to contact support and pay money to get another disk to make the bootable disk even start properly. (Funny how they don't mention that in the sales pitch).

Now it starts, and recognises the drives, but man it takes ages to do anything. I'm using the 'quiet no acpi' option, but it took 4 hours to analyse the partitions and has now hung for an hour on the 'select partition to restore' screen after I hit next. Nothing is happening, no messages telling me to wait, no progress bar, nothing.

The website/sales pitch for this product makes out that the restore process is super fast and will save you loads of downtime, but I could have easily re-installed Windows and all of the apps quicker than this!!

Does anyone know how long it should take to get through the options on the bootable media screens? I haven't even got to starting the actual restore process yet!

It's only a 12GB partition to restore when it does actually get going.

Any/all help appreciated.

 

"Apparently SATA drives cause probs"

Well, I guess I know what my problem is now. Acronis True Image home does the same thing. I'm going to dump Acronis and use Vista Ultimate's backup feature.

What a joke. SATA has been around for how long now?

 

I use the home version with both IDE and SATA drives and it works OK for me, and I'm sure most other people have the same experience. If Acronis couldn't support SATA, they wouldn't have a market, so that's really not the case.

The tool sometimes has issues with supporting the latest drives being made, but that seems reasonable, and from what I read they can provide you with new boot code that will solve that problem. It sounds like you already did that step.

So, that being said, the performance you're seeing is not normal. The tricky part is figuring out what is causing it. Its reported here frequently, but nobody seems to have a consistent solution to it. They try a lot of different things, but they can't always fix the problem. With a fairly small partition like you have the entire restore process shouldn't take more than 15-20 minutes, 30 minutes at the most. And to answer your question about the screen options, with the exception of one of them (either after you choose the image to restore from or after you choose where to restore the image to, I can't remember for sure) the next screen should appear immediately after you click the next button. The one exception takes maybe 30-60 seconds until the next screen. You should be into the restoration process itself within about a minute or two after booting from the disk.

I'd try a few more basic suggestions people will offer here on this forum, then if it still doesn't work I'd ask Acronis for my money back and try a different product. There's too many variables to just keep guessing on your own, its not worth the time.

 

Hello all,

Thank you for using Acronis Corporate Products

simonthegeek, you should try all options available for Acronis Booting rescue media (not only acpi=off noapic option).

If the performance is still unacceptable, please download Acronis Report utility available here and run it, create a report and attach to your post.

This would provide us with detailed information on the hard disk partition structure.

Thank you.

--
Oleg Lee

 

Just to update this:

I’m afraid I’m still having many, many problems. It’s getting a bit silly now! This is supposed to be easy and quick, but I have spent over 72 hours onsite trying to get 1 single 12GB partition to restore and it’s still not working.

I’m trying to use Universal Restore to migrate an installation of MS Small Business Server to a new machine. The build of the boot disk included with my installation of TI Echo did not recognise the SATA drives in the new machine. The alternative build of the boot disk supplied the support staff could see the drives, but it was a very slow process to get the restore done.

‘Analysing partitions’ screen took over an hour.
‘Select which partition to restore’ screen took 45 mins.
Every time I pressed next on any screen in the recovery wizard it took ages to do anything and just hung.
3-4 hours later, the restore process finally STARTED. Not finished, just started.
Restoring a 12GB partition then took over 24 hours!!

However, when it completed the drive would not boot. The Windows loading screen comes up, then the machine switches off and loops round constantly trying to boot.

Won’t boot into safe mode either, just does the same thing.

I'm now going to run the report utility suggested above - and thanks to all who have replied to this thread so far, I really appreciate your help.

Simon

 

Hello Simon,

Thank you for using Acronis Corporate Products

We can try another environment, you may create WinPE disk and perform the recover under it. The step-by-step guide on how to create WinPE disk is available in the article Creating WinPE ISO with Acronis True Image here

Thank you.

--
Oleg Lee