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Just curiosity.... what makes .tib so fast?

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My .tib of full install winxppro 32 with multiple favorite programs included in the backup, total of about 7gb, loads from Acronis .tib in about eight minutes.

My original winxppro 32 installation disks, that's just the OS, takes over half an hour.

I just downloaded and installed, just out of curiosity, the windows 8 evaluation package. 2.2 gb. The installation took over an hour and the harddrive sounded like it was losing it's mind with frantic activity.

If I backed up that installation on a disk as a .tib file I have a hunch it would load back onto a clean harddrive in about five minutes without all the frantic drive activity.

This is kind of a two part question I guess. How can .tib files be so damn fast. And why is it that Microsoft installations, of many stripes, are so mind numbingly slow?

I've tried a few Linux distros in the past and they typically would load the full OS on a clean drive in less that ten minutes. On the Microsoft side, in addition to the operating systems, whenever I've installed updates, patches, service packs, etc, the process just seems to just go on, and on, and on.

Like I said. Just curious about this. .tib files.... scorching fast. MS files..... curiously slow. Any easy to understand answer?

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istanbul:

The installation program for Windows has a lot of tasks to do - it has to figure out the machine's hardware, select and load the appropriate drivers, configure the OS for the desired language settings, etc. While doing all of these things there is a lot of CPU activity and copying of files to the disk.

Once Windows has been installed, a .tib file can be created quite rapidly (in comparison) since the only task is to copy disk sectors and stuff them into a file (in compressed format). Restoring the .tib file can be equally fast since the program is simply uncompressing the contents of the .tib file and writing the bits back to disk.

The major difference then between restoring the contents of a disk and installing Windows is that there is little or no decision-making happening during a disk restore, but a lot of decision-making happening when installing Windows initially.

Your one-hour time for installing Windows 8 seems quite high. I think that it took only 15 minutes when I installed Windows 7.