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Slow Validate and inaccurate times

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I understand that verification of incremental backups make take a long time because it is validating the entire chain but I walk away from the PC with it estimating 45 minutes remaining come back 45 minutes later and it estimates 30 minutes remaining. Verifies are taking many hours. What might be wrong?

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David,

On what drive is the backup located?  how large is the entire archive?  Normally a validation does not take as much time as you indicate.  Validation is merely a checksum comparison so should be relatively fast.

Have you always had this issue?

I'd ignore the timer and let it do it's thing.  The accuracy has never been very good in my opinion.  Primarily because as it is scanning large files, it goes quickly, but as it compares individual system files (logs folders, Windows, System32 directory and similar folders it gets much slower and this causes the estimation times to fluctuate all over the place depending on where it's at in the process.  

It's not a cop-out, just how it is.  The USB 3.0 performance will definitely ebb and flow.  You can test this similarly when copying a single 4.7Gb DVD .iso file to an average speed usb 3.0 thumb drive - goes pretty quick.  Now, copy your C:\Windows\System32 folder to that drive instead and watch how long it takes to get to about 4.7Gb. In your case, if this is the 5Tb drive with the 32Gb PCIE cache, it's only going to perform at spinning drive speeds because that cache isn't going to do any good for this type of job either.

Yes, I feel it should be more accurate as well, but it's adjusting based on how fast the file system responds to the queries.  Basically, add up how long it took to take the initial backup, each incremental in the chain and then add some time to compare them based on the version in the chain selected.  The amount of data backed up, the type of drive connection and the driver performance will all come into play as well. 

I've done a ton of backup / recovery measurements with Acronis and several competing products (I have 5 backup programs on my PC).  Acronis pretty much wins on backup and recovery time over all of them.  Some are close and some occassionally eek out a slightly faster time (by a few seconds, but usually are slower) when all other aspects are kept at a constant.  

My experience with computers goes back over fifty years, and I've never seen a progress estimate that's accurate until it says "Done."

I have been ignoring it and it finishes eventually. I have about 3.6TB in total. Validation takes about 5 to 6 hours.

That seems about right for the amount of data.