Acronis TI 11 Restore *incredibly* slow

Discussion in 'Acronis True Image Product Line' started by GeorgR., Apr 17, 2008.

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  1. GeorgR.

    GeorgR. Registered Member

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    I want to state my disappointment with Acronis 11 TrueImage.

    On a NTFS HD with 250GB of data i had a damaged MFT, so my choice was to reformat the whole HD and do a filewise restore of all the data. (I deliberately chose NOT to restore an image since i wanted to make sure i write plain file-data back from my backup on my freshly formatted HD)

    I booted on the Acronis TI recovery CD and chose the option to copy the files back (not a partition, not an image!). I started the restore at default options, and i went to bed.

    8 hours later i turn on my PC, expecting all my data ready to go. Acronis TI is about half-way done and tells me "9 hours left".

    This must be the biggest joke!

    Also...from the recovery CD (or using the bartpe plugin which i installed on a bartpe bootable XP install disk) there is NO option to mount the archived image as a volume. I can only use this option while on a running XP/Vista install (where i installed Acronis TI).

    This is how i finally finished this backup, not in nine hours, but in merely 30mins: I mounted the image as a device in Vist and then copied the data over in explorer.

    The problem here: It was a pure coincedence that the partial restore (which already took 8hrs!) already restored my acronis folder. So i could properly boot and mount the image from the working acronis ti.

    If you dont have a working system with Acronis TI installed and accessible you have to stick with the Acronis recovery CD....and the restore is extremely, extremely slow. (20hrs +/- for 250GB of data...).

    Btw. Vista 64 4GB of memory, Intel Core2 Quad and two internal Sata drives.
     
  2. Xpilot

    Xpilot Registered Member

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    True image , as its name suggests, is best as an imaging and restore tool. Using it as a repair tool to fix a damaged MFT is possible but not what it was designed to do. Had you used the Bart plugin CD the file restorations would have been far quicker than using the standard recovery CD as the Windows drivers would have been a better match.

    To avoid problems in future with large data volumes I would suggest you keep another copy on another hard drive. To wait till a problem surfaces is in my book rather foolish.

    Xpilot
     
  3. shieber

    shieber Registered Member

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    When ATI takes a terribly long time to backup or restore, it's a very good sign that ATI is doing repeated read/write attempts for many of the sectors. This can be do to memory the farthest reaches of which are not usually called into use but can be with ATI (so the problem only shows up when using ATI or when using amemorty tester like memtest), inadequate drivers in ATI, and, of course, harddisk errors.

    If you've checked out memory and the harddisk and see no problems, then contact Tech Support. They'll ask you to collect some system information and may be able to provided diff drivers that will work better on your hardware set up.
     
  4. GeorgR.

    GeorgR. Registered Member

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    Hello,

    the screwed up MFT was already repaired by doing a full, re-format of the HD. Subsequent runs of chkdsk also told me that the partition is clean, no bad sectors or any problems. So at this point this wasnt an issue anymore since the HD/filesystem was clean. (The HD itself is fine also)
    All i wanted is a simple filewise (back-)copy of my backup files without restoring back a whole image since i wasnt certain whether at the time of the backup the image already would restore back a faulty MFT.
    The irony is that ATI has the feature to mount a virtual volume - but its not available when its needed badly (eg. from rescue CD)...and there is also no reason to access the backup-archive sectorwise or whatsoever since it shouldnt be big deal to copy the files back at normal speed. (And i am talking about ATI about 10x slower than what its supposed to be)

    Btw. my SATA drives are running in IDE legacy mode...and i dont need drivers or have any dirver problems accessing those anyway possible...from various bootable media where i never installed any IDE drivers.
    Another observation i made, a competitor product is very well capable of mounting its archives as virtual devices if i throw the software on a bartpe CD.

    >>
    Had you used the Bart plugin CD the file restorations would have been far quicker than using the standard recovery CD as the Windows drivers would have been a better match.
    >>
    The problem with the BartPE environment is that Acronis from the BartPE did now allow me to mount a virtual device - so i did not have the option to mount an archive and just do a simple file copy. (What i wanted). It might be the case that the "internal" file-wise copy within BartPE would've been faster compared to the rescue CD...but thats just a guess, i didnt try this.


    Add: My system is stability tested, this includes memory testing and overall stabiltiy testing. Taking so long to read the archive would imply the backup-source volume is corrupt...but it certainly is not.
     
    Last edited: Apr 17, 2008
  5. Xpilot

    Xpilot Registered Member

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    When booted from the standard TI recovery CD the computer is booted into a cut down Linux recovery environment. This obviously has considerable differences to opening TI in a Windows environment. Being unable to explore an image when booted from the TI is to be expected because Explorer is not included on the TI CD.

    The extreme slowness was almost certainly because the Linux drivers on the CD were a very poor match for your hardware. Had you used the Bart PE CD the recovery would have run using Windows drivers and it have run in a fraction of the time.

    Xpilot
     
  6. MudCrab

    MudCrab Imaging Specialist

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    Using BartPE or VistaPE with mustang's plugins would have allowed you to mount the image. Acronis does not support mounting with their plugin.
     
  7. GeorgR.

    GeorgR. Registered Member

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    Thanks for the links!
     
  8. Acronis Support

    Acronis Support Acronis Support Staff

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    Hello GeorgR.,

    Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

    We are sorry for delayed response.

    Please notice that NTFS is a proprietary filesystems, and exact specifications are held secret by Microsoft. Therefore, all existing Linux drivers that work with NTFS are not perfect. It's to be expected that it takes even longer to decrypt corrupted NTFS filetable in Linux environment.

    In such cases we may recommend you to use BartPE or VistaPE bootable media (as suggested by Xpilot and MudCrab), which use native Windows drivers to access NTFS file structure. Another solution could be performing a full image restoration to a spare drive, then copying files to a clean partition.

    Thank you.
    --
    Marat Setdikov
     
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