Holy heck!! ATI 8 (and XP SP 2?)

ATI 8.0 build 763 on Windows XP SP2--just bought today, but it's obviously really flaky. Is the more recent build any better?

My story with build 763...

I'm trying to backup my system partition (C:/ drive), which is an NTFS partition of about 9GB (with page file, etc...).

TrueImage reports about a 4GB backup, with reasonable compression; that seems right to me.

When I start the backup, the program says it will take *20 hours* to complete!

I think to myself, ok, it's just miscalculating. There's no way a P4 3GHz with 1.5 GB of RAM and 15K Ultra320 SCSI drives can take 20 hours to compress and write a 4GB file.

So I look again, and then it says "a day" to complete the task!

So off to the help, and then I change the priority of the backup to "high" on the sys tray app, and it changes to over two days!! Ah....right...

Meanwhile, back on the HD, on the physically separate SCSI drive I'm creating the backup image, ATI is creating files.

Many files... over 54,000 1KB files, in fact, when I finally killed the thing!

This is the backup, no doubt--and yes, it will take days at 1KB a piece. And why on earth is it doing this to begin with?

What gives? And then I read that this cannot restore from DVD media?? (even if I burn a good image myself?).

Does anyone use this software successfully in an NTFS environment with XP SP2?

Is it worth upgrading to the more recent build? Or should I just remove it from the OS?

Thanks in advance for all advice!

 

Upgrade to the latest version

 

OK, I did upgrade to the mose recent version, and--without breaking the backup into multiple files--ATI actually let me create a 4.1 GB backup on the hardrive (ok--there were some weird quirks--like telling me I can't create a folder in "My Computer"--which I wasn't trying to do anyway!).

But it did complete the image in about 3 minutes--and verified it in about the same amount of time (under 5, anyway). So something was seriously wrong before! Oddly enough, this doesn't exactly inspire confidence

So then I fire up Nero to burn the backup image, no problems. One UDF +R backup of the image complete...

When I go to verify the image on the disk I just burned, ATI (again--now most recent build) says it will take 1 hour and 30 minutes to verify. Well, and at least it's been going down--it's under an hour now But why would it take so long? Just curious...

Next we'll see if I can even boot from the rescue disk

 

verifying and restoring from DVD media does take longer (though when I did it it wasn't as long as 90 minutes), presumably because of the lower transfer rates and seek times of the DVD drive compared to the hard drive.