Restoration Time Growing
I backed up a laptop drive C to an external usb drive, then tried to restore all files with original paths to a new laptop EXCEPT under a folder named OLD Drive C. This allows moving files to the new environment at my leisure and protects the OS. Restoration looked like it would take 3 hours for a while and decreased as files were transferred. But, it is stuck near 80% now (for 4 hours) and the predicted restoration time is now over 3 days. Any ideas?
"Is there enough space on the disk to continue restoring?"
It has around 800 GB of space and the backup image was around 60 GB on the hard disk. Strangely, after several more hours it started transferring data quicker and completed the restoration in just over 15 hours. This is still unacceptable and it seems to be one of those pesky quirks that never gets fixed in subsequent versions. This may be the last Acronis version I try since other vendors are now starting to offer equivlent functionality. This software just has too much personality and Acronis management ought to require it be fixed.
That is inordinately long for a 60 GB image. Is it possible that there's an issue with your USB drive, cable or USB port? Perhaps data are transferring at much less than normal USB 2.0 speeds.
What method did you use to restore the files? The in-product restore UI, the copy/paste out of the image, or did you mount the image and use Windows explorer to copy/paste?
The slowest is the copy/paste out of the image. The other two methods are roughly equivalent.
"That is inordinately long for a 60 GB image. Is it possible that there's an issue with your USB drive, cable or USB port? Perhaps data are transferring at much less than normal USB 2.0 speeds."
An hour into the restoration it estimated 2 hours to complete. But, when it got to 85% it stuck there for many hours. Surprisingly, it started again and completed. I can't envision a hardware compatibility issue with that behavior.
What method did you use to restore the files? The in-product restore UI, the copy/paste out of the image, or did you mount the image and use Windows explorer to copy/paste?
The slowest is the copy/paste out of the image. The other two methods are roughly equivalent.
I used the product GUI to restore all files and directory structures under another archive folder on the new laptop.
The time estimates for restorations are usually meaningless, in my experience. The actual time used is what I'm judging. If a restoration or backup takes much longer than it should, for the size involved, it could be a USB connection issue as I said.
I agree with Tuttle. On more recent computers, the restore speed is typically limited by the bandwidth of the connection to the backup medium. With USB 2.0 you can count anywhere between 25MB/s to 35MB/s (you can test this on your computer by copying a large file across and time the windows transfer). This will give you an idea of the time needed with ATI. You can add some penalty for overhead if you have a (long) chain of incrementals, encryption, or high level of compression, but nothing huge.