Is Validating Supposed to Use 99% Of Ram?

Hello Jeff,

Do not worry, I will assist you with this situation.

Generally, the validation process should not take 99% of RAM, especially in the case when you have 4 GB. This process can be compared with simple backup, from performance point of view.

In your situation it looks like Validation hangs or tries to read some corrupted information. The process itself just does the comparison of checksum written after snapshot with the current backup checksum. And if they do not match, the product tells you about image corruption.

I would suggest you to do the following to localize the issue:

1. Try copying your backup from eSata to some internal drive (just to exclude external drive\connector issue) and perform the same validation

2. To exclude some third part software installed under Windows as the cause, please try to perform the same validation from Acronis Bootable Media (it can be created under Tools).

3. Please make sure that the memory module of your machine is not corrupt as this can be the reason of the issue.

Please download the archive.

Unpack the archive and burn the unpacked ISO file to CD.

We recommend you to refer to the article if you are not familiar with ISO burning.

After that boot your PC from the CD and memtest will start automatically. When it is 100% completed (1 or 2 passes), create a digital photo of the screen and send it to us, by attaching to your answer in this thread.

If the issue still persists, could you please clarify the following: 

1. Which product do you use?

2. Could you please let me know the build number of the product, which you can find in the Help -> About dialog (it should be a 3 or 4 digit number)?

3. Do you have any anti viral \ encryption software installed?

4. Which backup are you trying to validate (disk \ partition or file backup)?

Also, please let me know if you have any other questions concerning our products, I would be glad to assist you.

We are looking forward to hearing back from you at your earliest convenience.

Thank you.

I have a Intel quad core 2.4 GHz / 4 GB DDR2 Ram /OS = Win 7 Home Premium x64. I own Acronis True Image Home 2010 build 6053

During backup consolidation all available memory is used (about 200MB left). Computer is almost not responsible. It's look like everything is moved to swap file.
After backup computer is slow for a while and disk is heavily used.

Alexander:
I've tried all your suggestions... And with zero success...

Answers To Your Questions.....

~Product & Build Used = Acronis True Image [Home] 2010 / Build 6053
~Antivirus / Security= Kaspersky Internet Security 2009
~Backup Validating = Partition & File Backups

Note: I've figured out how to validate, without massive use of RAM (During this way used only 30% of RAM)
I can only validate as a seperate function [Task] Not part of one single backup.

This approach did not work for my Music + Video Drive [validating eats 90+% through the whole process]

Jeff - pausing Kaspersky protection for validation time will help.

I've never had a conflict with Kas and ATI running. Not saying it can't happen. However, I'd probably add tib files to the exlcusion list so Kas doesn't bother scanning them on each access. Or exclude trueimage itself (all the exe modules).

But 99% is probalby a more serious prob. Are your validations finishing? Or is there a definite hang occuring?

One confirmation question to add:

Are you looking at TI process RAM usage, or "Physical memory Available" in task manager?

If the latter, report also what it says under "System Cache". It may very well be that windows is caching as much of the data as possible during validation. Usually, this should not be a bad thing.

If it is TI process itself allocating all the memory, that indeed is a very bad thing.

(sorry if the terms used in task manager are not exactly same on your windows version, but should be close to those)

It is acutal memory... I've replaced & added up to 6 GB RAM with same constant high usage of RAM.... I did find success with reducing ram usage down to 30-40% by using no compression settings on all drives. What I've found was that any drive with large amount of compressed files like: .mp3 / .mpg / .mpeg / .iso / .nrg [etc....]

So basically to resolve my issue I had to: Set up validating as a seperate task and turn off all compression.... Hopefully in the future there will be a way to use these funtions....

I've upgraded to Windows 7 x64 and continue to have the same problem. Using the same settings as above... Plus installing "MemClean". I can keep ram from 30%-80% automatically... Still hoping for a software fix as apposed to a band-aid

Acronis TI 2011 build 6597
on Win7 Pro 64bit, Core i5 760 (Quad Core), 4GB RAM.

When I do a full volume image over two disks (system and data disk) validation takes about two hours and consumes 97-98% of RAM.
The backup is password protected and encrypted using AES 128bit, all through TrueImage. No encryption or compression is used on the disks that are being backed up. The system runs fine, no RAM or HDD errors present.

I have deactivated GDATA Antivirus 2011 for test purposes but it does not make any difference. The backup disk is attached via SATA. Needless to say it's impossible to use the PC for work during validation.

I activated automatic shutdown after backup and email notification for all events - none is sent whether the process was successful. I just get the message related to "waiting for shutdown". I assume the first message is not sent because RAM is so heavily used - any other action during backup takes minutes to cause a reaction.

This did not occur with TrueImage 2010 on exactly the same hardware.

I attach the TIH System Report.

Any help?

Daniel Rüegg wrote:

Acronis TI 2011 build 6597
on Win7 Pro 64bit, Core i5 760 (Quad Core), 4GB RAM.

When I do a full volume image over two disks (system and data disk) validation takes about two hours and consumes 97-98% of RAM.
The backup is password protected and encrypted using AES 128bit, all through TrueImage. No encryption or compression is used on the disks that are being backed up. The system runs fine, no RAM or HDD errors present.

I have deactivated GDATA Antivirus 2011 for test purposes but it does not make any difference. The backup disk is attached via SATA. Needless to say it's impossible to use the PC for work during validation.

I activated automatic shutdown after backup and email notification for all events - none is sent whether the process was successful. I just get the message related to "waiting for shutdown". I assume the first message is not sent because RAM is so heavily used - any other action during backup takes minutes to cause a reaction.

This did not occur with TrueImage 2010 on exactly the same hardware.

I attach the TIH System Report.

Any help?

Daniel Rüegg wrote:

Acronis TI 2011 build 6597
on Win7 Pro 64bit, Core i5 760 (Quad Core), 4GB RAM.

When I do a full volume image over two disks (system and data disk) validation takes about two hours and consumes 97-98% of RAM.
The backup is password protected and encrypted using AES 128bit, all through TrueImage. No encryption or compression is used on the disks that are being backed up. The system runs fine, no RAM or HDD errors present.

I have deactivated GDATA Antivirus 2011 for test purposes but it does not make any difference. The backup disk is attached via SATA. Needless to say it's impossible to use the PC for work during validation.

I activated automatic shutdown after backup and email notification for all events - none is sent whether the process was successful. I just get the message related to "waiting for shutdown". I assume the first message is not sent because RAM is so heavily used - any other action during backup takes minutes to cause a reaction.

This did not occur with TrueImage 2010 on exactly the same hardware.

I attach the TIH System Report.

Any help?

Did you try a complete drive image with no compression? [default is set at "Normal"] and is compressing the backup.

Did you try to exclude these file types from the drive your trying to make an image of? [.iso, .mp3, video files & zipped files]

Did you try a separate task to validation task? As apposed to having the validation part of the backup [image] task? Run this one after a shut down and restart of acronis...

Good Luck!

Hi Jeff - Thanks. No, I did not test yet without compression nor excluding the files you mention nor try the separate validation task. As soon as I find some time to test I will try your suggestions. However - previous versions did not show this behaviour. Anyway ... I wish you Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Daniel