How Long Should A Restore Take?

I've posted this question as part of a larger posting earlier, but after reading through a bunch of message, I thought I'd add this as a separate post.

I've seen some posting describing doing a restore of a partition in 10 minutes! My restore of my 190 gig hard drive partition C (with about 50 gigs worth of programs and data on it), being restored from a second internal hard drive, took about 15 hours.

Is this normal? Does this time frame sound right? Please, some input on this.

Thanks....Jason

 

Not the best example, but on my P3-400 laptop, a restore of my system and program/data partitions (about 1.3GB) takes about 10 min (give or take a few minutes, I've stopped timing it and go do something else for a bit). Definately under 15 min including reboot times.

 

To answer your question first, it may be normal depending on which build you are using and your specific hardware configuration.

In my case I boot from the CD and I restore a 40GB drive with 15Gb data in about 15 minutes with build 826. But, with build 859 the same image takes 2 hours and 10 minutes. Why?

Because Acronis screwed up the drivers in build 859.

They ask me to create sysinfo and send it to them from each operation. Hey, you don't need sysinfo to know its the drivers in build 859 that got screwed up.

I'm not a very satisfied True Image 8 owner. If I knew it had all these problems like corrupted files and bad image mounters and drivers that get worse with a new build and cd messages that get more screwed up with each build and lots of other things that never get fixed and every new build is a crapshoot as to whether it's going to chew up my hard drive and new builds that don't support existing hardware and a lot of other things...........I PROBABLY STILL WOULD HAVE BOUGHT IT!

Does that sound nuts? Well, True Image 8 is worth the $34 I paid for it when I can restore an image in 20 minutes or even 2 hours. It beats the alternative.

What REALLY pisses me off is that Acronis has all these stupid little surprises in each new version and that newer has NEVER been better with True Image 8 except in a few instances. They are sloppy testing because they probably just don't really care or they're arrogant and assume the damn thing will work or worse, they have no respect for their customer's sanity and use us as their test lab rats figuring that we'll turn up the problems and they can patch patch patch until we shut up and they issue a new build and the cycle starts all over again.

If only Acronis would be honest up front about the flaws in this product I could deal with the expected. It's the unexpected that really knocks me for a loop especially when something worked in a previous build and stops working in a newer build. That's really unforgivably lame on their part.

Finally, I like that Ilya and Irina and the rest ~snip~ participate here - - it's a big help mostly and very reassuring to know they pay attention. I really start to feel sorry for them with some of the beating up they take here. But I wish they'd stop acting like all our comments are a complete surprise to them in every thread. They must know they're working on a beta program with True Image 8. It sure isn't a primetime product in any stretch of my imagination and the problems cited in these messages proves that.

Whatever ~snip~ teach them that if something ain't broke don't fix it and if something works then don't improve it because an Acronis improvement is similar to devolution of a species if you know what I mean.

If I was rating this product I'd give it a C- which when I went to school meant you flunked the grade but that either the teacher felt sorry for you and you got a sympathy passing grade or the teacher hated you and passed you along so she wouldn't have to look at your ugly mug for another school year.

I got the same feelings about True Image 8. I like it when it works in a few cases with specific hardware but I hate it when a new build breaks something that worked before or continues to fail to deliver on previous promises of functionality.

End of rant.

 

A restore on my computer takes around 6 minutes. This is to restore 18.5 GB of data. The reason it is so quick on my computer is no doubt because I have two 10,000 RPM Western Digital 74GB Raptor drives and my computer overclocked to 3.6GHz (processor is actually 3.2 GHz).

I am delighted at the speed with which Acronis restores images on my computer. I have used Acronis on slower computers (Pentium 3 with slower hard drives) and it has taken between 20 and 30 minutes for a restore of around 5GB of data. I always use normal compression when creating an image. Anyone that uses high compression will likely find that the restore time is increased.

 

Hello Donprovo,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

I do understand what you feel and I am really sorry for the problems you got with the latest build. Our Development Team is constantly working on the improvement of drivers. You know how broad the range of modern models of hardware is now and it we want every our customer to be able to work with Acronis software. We do understand that sometimes these imrovements affect the systems that worked properly and that is why we decided to give our customers the ability to download several previous builds. If you send a letter with the description of the problem we will certainly examine the situatin with particular your system and will try to help you. Usually the letters of this kind help us to improve our drivers for particular systems. As you see it is impossible to test our software with all configurations that exist and we are limited to several that are most common.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

Hi Donprovo,

If Acronis was as uncaring as you make them out to be I doubt that they would be fronting up an open support forum such as this. Not many companies allow their dirty linen to be laundered in public. I'm pretty sure all isn't sweetness and light over at Symantec/Norton. However, we'll never know for sure as they don't run an equivalent official support forum on which users can air their problems/grievances.

I guess most of Acronis's difficulties result from the fact that they dared to tread a different path i.e. use Linux rather than Windows PE as the boot environment. Given the flood of new hardware/chipsets that's hit the streets over the past year or so, perhaps even they are beginning to question the wisdom of this choice!!

Anyway, stick with it as I'm sure they will iron out the current wrinkles as quickly as they can (hopefully without introducing too many new ones ). Perhaps you can help to speed up this process by offering to become a Beta Tester (see the Acronis web site)?

Regards

 

Menorcaman I agree with you. Only thing is I think there are two different Acronises. One is the nice Ilya's and Irina's and the other is the geeks that don't test the crap they post on the website and call it a new build.

Hey, I already am a beta tester. I bought True Image 8!!!

So is everybody else that bought it.

 

Ummm, I guess there could be a grain of truth in that!!

Regards

 

Hello Donprovo,

We have a good system of handling cusotmers' problems so every issue reported to support@acronis.com cannot be "lost" or whatever we may call it. Each customer is important for us and we take into account all your wishes and try to help with all the problems. Sometimes a fix or at least workaround exists, sometimes we need to contact our Development Team so that they could update particular module to let it work with customer's hardware. In any case we always try to help people who purchased the full version or downloaded the trial version of Acronis software because our main goal is not just sell the program but to let people use it in the way they need.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

Hi Ilya. First I wish to say I'm grateful for your participation here and like Menorcaman says, your competitors would never allow a forum like this to exist for their products. They didn't even answer my emails when I lost my serial number to their cloner and that's why I'm a TrueImage 8 beta-tester, I mean owner....just teasing.

As you can see by my ramblings I am disappointed that TrueImage 8 hasn't been everything I expected so I could have used it to rub your competitor's nose in all their shortfalls. I hate their products and the way they treat their customers. They could be deemed by some to be truly arrogant but I won't say that so they don't cry foul.

If I ran Acronis right now, I'd stop my TrueImage 8 development team from working on anything else like future "improvements" and force them to eliminate each and every known bug in the most recent two or three builds like image mounters, checksum checkers, disk cloners and most of all the worlds worst user manual for one of the worlds best disk imagers.

I'd make damned sure they had the best drivers for the boot rescue cd and I'd have clicky button choices for things like quiet on/off so you didn't sit there looking at a hung screen and not know what to do.

And, I'd make these developers develop a worthwhile graphical user interface that provided users with meaningful time graphs, not the kind that say thirty hours and take 25 minutes.

I'd make sure that when TrueImage 8 presented a window that says it's going to clone your hard disk you don't have any options to select partitions on the source drive. How stupid is that? If a clone is a clone it should be a clone, right? It ain't no clone if it's different than the source drive in any way whatsoever!!! So, why all the freakin' choices other than partition expansion to fill a bigger drive? And why not provide the same capability to restore an image to a LARGER drive?

I'd make sure these developers developed a truly user friendly product that had an interface that allowed a user to sail through creating an image or cloning a disk WITHOUT all the pie in the sky confusing choices for clicking this or that 100 times before you create a disk image or clone a disk. After all, most people don't want to be rocket surgeons or brain scientists, they just want to create a quick backup image or do a quick hard drive upgrade disk clone. So why can't your interface use the well-proven concept of having all the advanced features like secure zones and ultimate clickability of processes hidden behind an advanced user interface?

You know as I read these threads I see can't help but feel that at least half of the questions and complaints posted here are a result of poor technical documentation and a user interface that is out of synch with user expectations. If your developers cleaned up some of the mess they created in the past before they rushed patches out for the future I bet you'd have a lot more contented beta-testers, er, I mean TrueImage 8 users, than you do now......just teasing again.

 

Hello Donprovo,

We are constantly working on the improvement of our interface as well as of the User's Guide to let customers use the software without any efforts. Some options, however, like the Linux Kernel Settings shouldn't be presented to customers because it is designed for debugging option only. All the problems that arise in our software are investigated and improvements are implemented if necessary. If you think there is something that worth to be added to Acronis software please feel free to post it to our Wishlist Thread. We will certainly consider all your wishes.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman