Why is TrueImage 10 so slow?!?

Discussion in 'Acronis True Image Product Line' started by ctbram, Mar 20, 2007.

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  1. ctbram

    ctbram Registered Member

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    For years I have been using Ghoost 2003 (The version before all this hot backup nonsense). I'd boot from the floppy. Select backup disk to image. Go away for an hour to an hour and a half max and reboot my system and viola I am done with a reliable backup that I am sure has not been corrupted by some background task popping up in the middle of my backup.

    With this NEW IMPROVED hot backup CAAAAAAAH-RAP! I start the backup at 1am go to bed get up at 7am and the backup is still an hour away from finishing!!! And it's backing up to a local drive! How long would a backup over the net take? A month?

    I can re-install my entire system including all 65gb of applications in less time then these True Image backups take?

    I am sure it's the "hot backup" crap that makes this thing so damn slow. All it takes is for your disk defrag(diskkeeper pro 10) to start up or your anti-virus scanner to start and you backup go from 8 hours to 35 hours!

    Why do have to wait 8 hour for a backup with new technology when my 5 year old Ghost backup software can back my system up in 90 minutes?

    What was wrong with shutting down and backing up from an idle disk? I see no advantage to this hot backup crap! The machine runs piss slow even when the backup priority is set to low. So slow in fact as to be almost unsuable except for the most bacic of tasks - like reading a static web page.

    I'd rather go away for 90 minutes and know I have a stable recovery backup then try to work on a wonky slow machine for 6 hours and then wonder if my backup is usable.

    What does this NEW technology offer that makes it worth waiting 6 hours to do what my 5 year old ghost program can still do in 90 minutes!
     
  2. seekforever

    seekforever Registered Member

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    So if you don't like it, shut it down and back it up with the TI rescue disk version.

    Using the Windows version I can back up 65GB of used space in about 40 minutes to an internal drive.

    Suggest you find out how an image program works to understand why defragging causes it to run so much longer.

    BTW, I always image in Windows with network, AV, firewall, email polling/receiving all running, never had a problem. I normally don't bother doing much else when it is backing up but others do.
     
  3. Bruce Mahnke

    Bruce Mahnke Registered Member

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    Something doesn’t sound quite right but it could be the nature of some of your applications. I’m also running Diskeeper 10 Pro, build 698 and I don’t see any interference or slow downs associated with it. Creating an image of a 160 GB Seagate IDE drive with 12 GB data to another internal IDE drive takes 6 – 7 minutes. Kaspersky AV 6.0 and all other applications are left running (not disabled). I routinely create the image in Windows but on occasion I do use the Rescue Media CD. As seekforever suggested creating an image with the Rescue CD might work for you.

    Bruce
     
  4. jmk94903

    jmk94903 Registered Member

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    Something is very odd about your system for it to take so long to backup to a local drive.

    My experience has been that with a P4 system of at least 2GHz with 512MB RAM or more, backups are done at 2-3GB per minute to a second local IDE hard drive. Backing up to a second partition on the same hard drive takes a bit longer, and backing up to a USB 2.0 external drive a bit more than that, but still not much under 1GB per minute.

    OK, so why is your system so slow? It appears to be the exception.

    First, try a backup from the Recovery CD. If that is fast, then it's a Windows problem as you suspect.

    Try shutting down your resident Windows applications and repeat the backup (or reboot into Safe Mode and try). If it's fast, reboot and shut down only half the resident programs and try again. Repeat this until you identify what is causing TI to run so slowly on your system under Windows.

    Your stituation is definitely not typical.
     
  5. Menorcaman

    Menorcaman Retired Moderator

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    Hello ctbram,

    Your post comes across as more of rant than a request for assistance. If you are genuinely interested in sorting out your problem then please provide some additional info e.g.:

    - Your Operating System
    - Version & build of TI being used
    - Size of used space being backed up
    - Whether Disk/Partion image or Files & Folders image
    - Backup image destination (internal HD, external USB HD, CD/DVD, networked HD, etc)

    It would also be appreciated if you toned down your language a bit. Thank you.

    Regards
     
  6. ctbram

    ctbram Registered Member

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    Seeker I know how image programs work and don't have to study anything to unsderstand why they slow down when a defragmenter is running.

    The point is with the old and reliable method I did not have to be concerned about understanding at all. In this new hot backup environment I do have to be concerned and have to go around and spend time shutting down my defrag service, making sure I don't have virus scanners or other scheduled tasks that could pop up is a waste of valuable time and potentially dangerous should one forget to restart and reschedule them!

    I love when you make a post and the first reply back you get is "if you don't like it go get stuffed".

    For the more civil replies I thank you all.

    Yes, the problem on this machine is that my virus scanner was schedule to start at 3am two hours after I started the backup and long after I had fallen asleep. But my point still stands with these live backup image creation applications you have to be concerned about every potential application that can fire up during the image making process and that is a head ache. Even running cold (from recovery disk) the backup is longer and makes a slightly larger backup file then ghost 2003, which is sad considering this is technology 5 years newer then that program. Unfortunately drive technology is advancing and ghost 2003 is not so I have decided to move on to a newer imaging package. I was hoping it would be faster or least equal.

    I also set compression to maximum and I don't know exactly how expensive that is relative to normal compression but the estimator put the storage savings at near 10gb so it was worth it to me.

    In the future I can always boot from the recovery CD and backup from there so I don't have to worry about going around and shutting services off, and turning sheduled processes off and then having to turn them all back on afterward.

    Personnally, I think an option to do the backup hot or cold should be set up as a switch in the software. At one point before Symantec ruined the ghost product it worked exactly that way. You scheduled the backup on a hot system and then the machine automatically shutdown booted to the minios, created the image, then rebooted. It was simple and painless and the user did not have to scrounge up the recovery disk, wait for the minios to boot, setup the backup, then manually reboot at the end. Then Symanthick re-engineered the product into total garbage. alas.
     
    Last edited: Mar 20, 2007
  7. ctbram

    ctbram Registered Member

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    Yeah Mano it is ranty, sorry.

    OS - windows xp pro service pack 2
    Trueimage 10 home build 4942
    69gb on a 150gb disk (ata33)
    one single primary partition c:
    destination: striped pair of 250gb ata 33 drives on a highoint raid controller.

    My gripe is this -
    Tansfer speed seems okay it's just the background processes seem to impact the software in a major way and there is no convient option to simply create the image "cold". Manually shutting down services and descheduling tasks is error prone and time consumming. Remember all those things have to be restarted and rescheduled again on the back end.

    The only other option is to boot from the recovery cd then run the backup from there. Which works but would be nicer if you could just choose whether to make the image from a live system or off a recovery disk or partition.

    I was dissapointed to see the a backup time of more then 6 hours to backup 69gb of data because I did not recall my virus scanner was going to pop up at 3am and that my defragger is set to smart defrag and was going to popping on during the backup. Having to manually shut these down prior to making backups is going to be a pain.
     
  8. Menorcaman

    Menorcaman Retired Moderator

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    Hello again ctbram,

    Thanks for the additional info.

    You should find that TI's initial time estimate for creating a Disk or Partition image decreases fairly rapidly to begin with and will then settle down to a more realistic figure. By my reckoning, backing up 69 GB of OS+apps+data via ATA33 should take around 3 hours or so using Normal Priority and Normal Compression. Whilst using Maximum compression will reduce the image size by a few Gigabytes, it can increase the time taken by as much as 50% and will use a lot more of your cpu cycles. Therefore, if you haven't already done so, I recommend that you set both the Priority and Compression options to Normal as a matter of routine.

    Regards
     
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