Backup Speed and Reliability vs 2017

Justin, welcome to these User Forums.

Speaking as one of the Beta testers for ATIH 2018 over the past several months, I have not found any issues with either the speed or reliability of backups in using this new version.

Overall, the speed (to me) is very similar to that achieved by 2017 though there are some improvements with regards to Cloud backups (after the initial full upload).

Reliability has remained good in both versions in my experience but I have not needed to do a full system recovery in true anger to fully test all the reliability components.  I have tested recovering individual partitions with no issues and have regularly used the Rescue Media.

One key change is the move away from Linux rescue media to using Windows RE / PE in the 2018 version and also using VSS for enabling a live Clone from within Windows.

Thanks for the prompt reply! The switch to Windows PE was about as much as I needed for the upgrade, just wondering if there was icing on the cake with improved backup speeds :) 4TB of data takes a while, hah. 

Justin, part of the changes introduced with ATIH 2018 was the Changed Block Tracker (CBT) which is intended to provide for faster incremental & differential backups but how you see these improvements depends on where you are backing up to, i.e. if you are backing up over a network then connection speeds etc will influence the performance, whereas local backups to internal or high-speed external USB (3.x) drives will see greater benefits.

I'm backing up from one of two Toshiba 7200rpm mechanical drives (host is i7-7700k with 32GB DDR4) to a WD NAS (Red drive), over a gig network with QoS priority for both of these nodes at full throughput. The NAS is the biggest bottleneck if the software isn't bogging down by anything internal. But I do run incremental backups for that disk so faster is better.

I'm pretty impressed with the improvements in 2018 - WinPE rescue media and the use of the recovery partition to build it (as one option) is most welcome.  Driver injection in there now too!

Speed-wise, I don't notice much difference either, but I'm coming from an NVME PCIE drive and to an SSD an 80GB backup takes about 3.5 minutes and only about 7 minutes to my WD MyCloud 4TB over wired Gb.

In my beta testing, I noticed that backup schemes work like they're supposed to, even if you edit the backup script and save the task again - something that hasn't been recommended in the past due to causing issues with the version chain count.  

So far, so good though.  They ticked off quite a few of my wish-list items in this release, so I'm pretty happy.

+1 on Bobbo's comments.  I am very impressed with ATI 2018, especially NAS support.  ATI 2018 handles multiple NAS logins (not mapped to a drive letter).  

Personally, I have never had a reliability issue with any version of ATI.

Regards to all,

FtrPilot

Ill be honest I like the interface but the slowness makes it useless to me. Windows OS setup disks, and drag and drop copies of your hard disk to an external drive are all you need to get the most dependable, comprehensive backup available. It just cannot be any easier than that. Buy an extra external HDD and keep it in a deposit box, send it to a trusted family member or friend. No need to pay an annual fee!

Kevin,

Just how slow is it?  You quote no specifics so there may well be something else at issue rather than 2018.  I have found that True Image is plenty fast.  Speed in most cases is hardware and/or data type dependent.  As an example already compressed data such as mp3 mp4 files take longer to backup for two reasons.  one is that already compressed data cannot be further compressed even though TI may attempt to do so and two, file folder backups are done at the bit level whereas disk backups are done at the block level which is much faster.

Hi Justin,

There are some improved features in acronis true image 2018 in comparison with 2017, eg:

- With just 2 clicks, you can start a full image backup.
- Increment of the disk backup space to the Acronis cloud or a local backup storage.
- Increase in the File backup space to Acronis Cloud or local storage system. 
- Upgraded Rescue bootable media,
- Upgraded Family data protection and Data Archiving features. 
- Upgraded File Synchronization system.
- Upgraded security and privacy tools

So its definitely worth upgrade to acronis true image 2018, check this comparison review between acronis 2018 and 2017 version.

All a person needs is their windows installation media, and the external drive. Why would I pay Acronis a license fee for every computer when all I need is run windows backup/restore? 

Try restoring your windows backup to a new or different pc...

yiu cant copy and paste a live version of your c drive to another disk and boot that copy.

windows backup is ok when it works but there's no password protection and backup schemes are minimal. 

You can't have multiple windows backups  on a network share.

in windows 10 it's called backup for windows 7 becmcause MS hasn't done anything good with it in ages.

use what you want for your needs and we will too.

If its a new PC, just install Windows, and restore your settings and data with Windows restore from an external drive. Its easy. 

I have gotten Acronis True image to work in the past but found it slow and buggy.  I even had to work with support to get the updates to install.  Then they wanted more money for the fixed version of 2017. I have learned the system is more stable if you simply use the windows installation media to restore your OS. 

Kevin, I have just done a restore as documented in topic: Workflow: Larger SATA to SSD as an example for another users and it couldn't have easier or smoother.  I used an external USB SATA docking station in the process described and all worked first time.

I've done a few tests backin up and restoring various VMWare VM's (Win 10 x64) and all have worked flawlessly so far.  I've modified the size of the virtual hard drives (to be restored to) and that hasn't make a difference.  So far, so good.

I'm curious why you chose to forgo the docking stations duplicator/clone function?

Why dont you use the VMWare tools? Ill bet you run into a host of licensing issues by copying one system to another. Its just as easy to  build everything the way you are supposed to, then you can use VmWare to restore. 

online clone feature is working great in 2018 (so far for me).  I have not been a fan of cloning in the past due to the need for Acronis to reboot the machine and modify the Windows bootloader which has bricked machines in the past.  However, doing the entire thing from Windows with VSS is much more stable and a safer procedure so I'm on board with it now.  I've been doing backup and restore for several years now and it's been rock solid so old habits are hard to break - especially when they're reliable and still easy to do :)

I just use VMWare for testing so I don't have to dork up my main rig (I used to test a lot more with it, but it's time consuming to pull drives and swap them in and out all the time so the VM is helpful for avoiding that part).  

I'm not worried about Windows licensing (activation) as I'm only concerned to see if the recovery works properly or not.  Basically if you restore one Windows image from VM A to VM B, it restores just fine, but Windows wont' activate - that's OK for the purpose of this type of testing.  However, for the primary VM I do have licensed, I treat it like a physical computer and it licenses just fine when I backup and restore with Acronis to and from it to various virtual hard drives within it.  I also backup the actual VMWare folder for this VM so I can always restore/recover it, in case something happens to the physical hard drive that houses the VM files.

VMTools doesn't backup your VM - you can snapshot save points (which I also use), but my goal for testing is to make sure that backup and recovery works as expected.  There are other tools that do this too, but I like Acronis and it seems to work equally well for physical and VM machines as I've gone back and forth between V-to-P and vice-versa on several ocassions. 

Hello, thank you all for listing and discussing the important changes in ATI 2018.

I currently have ATI 2017 and I noticed your comment "One key change is the move away from Linux rescue media to using Windows RE / PE in the 2018 version".  Using ATI 2017 I have made a (1) recovery disk using WinPE (i.e. not Linux) with the "Acronis Plug-in". Also one can make a (2) Universal Recovery Disk that launches your choice of a Linux or a WinPE environment, and allows for driver injection. So my question is: what is actually different in the ATI 2018 recovery media from items (1) and (2)? 

I was looking at Bob Huffman's blog "Power User Insights: Advanced WinPE/RE Driver Injection in Acronis Media Builder" and wondered if the same can be accomplished in ATI 2017 Universal Recovery Disk, choosing WinPE with driver injection.  https://www.acronis.com/en-us/blog/posts/power-user-insights-advanced-w…

Thanks!!

Acronis Rescue Media is a prerequisite to using Acronis Universal Restore which works with the end result of using Rescue media to restore a backup image made on one computer to another computer using different hardware.

Acronis Universal Restore cannot perform such a restore, that is not its purpose, so it has to booted/used as a separate component.  Its key purpose is to try to prepare a restored OS to work with the new hardware components found in the new computer where it is now restored to.  It does this by trying to inject generic device drivers for as many components as possible to allow Windows to work with those components, only asking for additional device drivers when hardware is encountered that isn't capable of using generic drivers or which isn't recognised / needs specific drivers.

It is possible to build bootable media that can include both the Rescue Media ATI application and also the Universal Restore application - Acronis has allowed for this across multiple versions but each is shown as a separate boot menu option.

WinPE media with injected device drivers is purely for the purpose of allowing that media to be used with hardware that would otherwise not be recognised, i.e. some RAID controllers, some NVMe M.2 drives etc.  The injected drivers are only applied to the bootable rescue media, they have no benefit to the installed Windows OS.

Thank you Steve Smith.  So what you are saying is that for transfering an image from one computer to another with different hardware, one has to use two steps: first perform a normal restore using Acronis Rescue Disk, followed by booting with the Universal Restore disk which will then look for missing drivers, giving you the opportunity to provide them with a USB for example? All this BEFORE the OS is allowed to boot on the new hardware?

If I have this correct, the new WinPE rescue disk of ATI 2018 is for providing drivers to only the rescue environment, such as to wireless keyboard and mouse, or RAID array, NOT for the restored OS platform. For that, you would still need Universal Restore. Correct?

Thanks as always for your expertise!

R5Eandme,

You have it correct.