8 of 9 - Recovering Partition
i seem to be stuck on the progress bar. Sometimes it will say Time left 2 Hours, but sometimes 3 hours. I am recovering from an incremental backup. Should i try again, or what should i do. not sure i have a patch or anything, Acronis True Image 2017.
yes first time. i restarted the process. yes i am recovering from rescue disk. this time i chose just the C drive. i think i made a mistake the first time choosing both c and f drive, f drive being rather large. size of partition on C drive i think was abuot 467 Gb. F drive was Terrabytes.
thanks for your quick response. i will wait this time for it to try to complete, and sleep on it.
Data takes time to recover - even with the fastest NVME PCIE drives. The rated speed of a drive is for single large files. As an example, I just got a couple of new NVME drives to compare. A single 4Gb .iso copied to any of them takes 2 seconds. However, I have a portable apps directory that is just under 7GB and it is full of folders and tons of little files. It takes between 8 and 10 minutes to robocopy the entire folder to each NVME drive , roughly 30 minutes to a standard SSD and well over an hour to my 120MB/s USB flash drive. Different types of data being written back to the drive will take different amounts of time and that's why the progress bar fluctuates so much, depending on what type of data it's recovering.
400Gb is still a lot to recover and will most likely take a bit of time. You may want to consider taking yoru backups differently or moving data around to make it speedier.
For me, I leave my OS (C: drive) bare bones with software and relatively little data - only the files I work with routinely. Everything else goes to a second D: drive (physical disk) which is 3TB. However, since it's all data, I don't backup the entire 3TB drive. Instead, I have it broken down into categories:
Pictures, Home Movies, TV shows, Movies, Software installers (.iso's, license keys, etc), music, Itunes, Itunes backups, etc and each one of those has it's own backup job.
The reason is, I can easily restore just my main OS drive in a matter of minutes if anything goes haywire and I can do this with no impact to any of the data. Likewise, I can do the same for any and/or all folders on my data drive without impacting the OS drive, or any other folders on the drive. This also severly reduces the size of any recovery I need to do, barring a complete recovery of a failed data drive where I would be required to recover all of it. It seems a lot easier to have only 1 or 2 backup jobs, but when it comes time to recover, when you have 100's of GB or TB's of data to recover all at once, that can actually be much more time consuming and painful.
Hopefully, when you wake up in the morning, your 400GB recovery will be complete :)
Yes it completed and mission accomplished. It is impossible to say how long it took, unless there is a report on that somewhere, since it happened sometime before 5:30 am when i checked in. It took quite a bit of time to recover another drive, most of the day. But the whole system is back.
Considering how you organize things is a good idea. To just put the OS on a single backup. How can i do that? Windows 7, 64 bit machine. I would like to see a feature in acronis that would pull out the necessary files and say Bacup the OS as an option. Otherwise i have no idea what that would take - all the program86 folders, and all the program folders. I suppose i could try to put everything else in another driver.
thanks for your ideas and reply.
ed
You could partition your drive. That's what I do.
My laptop contains a single hard drive. To allow for quicker and smaller OS backups and quicker restores, I partitioned my drive. I have C: for the OS, D: for most user data, and E: for music.
E: contains about 550 MB of music files, so if I included those files in every system backup the backups would take hours and .tib files would be huge. When I create Acronis True Image backups, I use Disk Mode and select the entire drive which therefore includes all partitions and hidden partitions. That gives me .tib files that I know can fully restore a working system. But, I exclude the music files by file type: *.flac, *.m4a, *.mp3. Note that the partition is included, as I have selected to backup the entire disk, but those music files are excluded from the .tib backups
I backup my music collection (over 25,000 large lossless files, about 550 GB) to two external HDs using Robocopy and a command line I wrote.
When I have the need to restore the OS, such as if a newly installed application causes problems, I restore just the C: partition. If I ever had need to restore everything, the entire disk, such as if I had totall drive failure and had to replace the drive, I would first restore the entire disk from the .tib image, and then I would restore the music files from the file-based backup using Robocopy.
Tuttle's scheme is sound and partioning may be the key if you have the space to do it on your drive. For me, I prefer to keep my drives to a single parition though so that I can restore the entire OS drive (including all partitions) in a single swoop which is probably easiiest for most people.
If you take the option to paritions or use a different drive for data, just move off as much as you can. Things like pictures, movies, music, maybe even documents are all "data" and can live anywhere as they have no ties to the OS or software. It's really hard to know what's on your drive and taking up that 400GB without knowing more. You probably also have a hibernation file, a paging file and probably old updates packages and maybe even a Windows.old folder from a Windows 10 upgrade - I don't really know. All of these types of things can be cleaned up to free up space on the OS drive as well. Other culprits of large space on driveds are often iTunes, which puts itunes backups in your adddata folder and can eat up a lot of space. Outlook PST's are another potential candiate. So can installed games, etc. etc. etc. Start with the easiest stuff though (movies, music, pictures, etc) and just move those to another parition or disk and see how much room that frees up on your OS drive/partition.
Another way to free up space (potentially) is to run "disk cleanup" and include the option for "sytem cleanup". This can take a while, but can free up a ton of space where old Microsoft patches and/or Windows upgrades may be eating up a lot of unnecissary space.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/instantanswers/8fef4121-711b-4be1-9…
And perhaps, cleanup your download folder, your browsing history/temp directory too - these can get really big if you never do it and it's all wasted space that you don't need to hold onto.
Other culprits of large space on driveds are often iTunes, which puts itunes backups in your adddata folder and can eat up a lot of space. Outlook PST's are another potential candiate.
If you have Apple devices and update them from iTunes on a Windows PC, check the appdata\roaming folder, as the device updates download there and generally are not cleaned up. Each one can be a few GB, so that adds up. I routinely delete them after updating my iPhone.
As Bobbo says, Outlook PST file can become huge. I don't have the latest version to check, but earlier Outlook versions had a "Compact PST" or similar command. For some reason, it was always necessary to run it three times for the most cleanup/compaction. If you've never done it, and if your PST file is large, the savings could be substantial.
thanks for all your replies guys. If i were to move folders to another external drive, what should i do to start a new build of backups? what if i were to do a restore after a few weeks of moving files? would i then by way of a restore put back all the moved folders (yes). so i need to start a new backup, and eventually remove the old backup. using acronis image 2017, ( and secondarily, how do i know if it has the patch), how do i proceed?
thanks in advance,
ed
I suppose that yes, if you keep old versions of the backup, you could potentially put things back after moving them. However, if you mark the date that you move the files and don't go back before that, you wouldn't have to worry about that either. It's really up to you. To keep it simple, just move the files and don't restore before that date unless you absolutely have to. But, you can also delete the "settings" of the existing backup and hold onto the existing backup files (as long as you see fit) and start a new backup job that starts fresh after you've made changes. It's really up to you though.
If there's no need to hold onto the old backup after a certain period of time, then feel free to delete them when you're ready. You can even keep them as is, but just the automated backups off and then delete them when ready as well. The main thing is just don't delete anything until you're comfortable with the new backups going forward and are confident that your changes have been backed up with a little bit of history to fall back on as well.
The patch is version 5555 and will show as 5555 when you check the version. The major release is 5554 at the moment. I don't have the patch installed so mine is 5554.