True Image 2020 Cloud backup - 6 DAYS?????

Steve, your upload speed is going to be the main factor here, 10 Mega Bits Per Second is not the same as 10 Mega Bytes per second, so the estimate you are seeing to upload over 300GB is probably optimistic if anything!

10 Mbps = 1.25 MBps assuming that you can consistently achieve this upload speed without it varying, pausing, stopping, restarting etc.

See KB 7963: First cloud backup is slow - for the official confirmation of this behaviour.

You also need to ensure that you select the nearest Cloud data centre to your geographic location to minimise the distances that can be involved too.

See KB 4350: Acronis Backup to Cloud access ports and hostnames - for details of where all the servers are and what ports they use.

Use the above in conjunction with the Acronis Cloud Connection Verification Tool.

Thanks, Steve. You're saying more or less what I expected to hear. Here in South Africa internet speeds are normally measured in megabits, rather than megabytes; and believe it or not, but 10 Mbps is considered quite a respectable speed!

So the big question is, does that rule out use of Acronis Cloud for backups? I can endure 6 (or a few more!) days for an initial backup; but if I do frequent incremental backups after that, can I expect to see them completed in a couple of hours? (Obviously I know this will depend on how many changes I'm making, but as an average.)

I will check out your link about the nearest access ports, though I would imagine it would have selected the nearest one automatically—or is that not so? But this, and the verification tool, I imagine will have to wait until the current backup completes. Painfully slow as it is, I'm still hoping that will happen within the next week!

Thanks again for your help.

Steve, your upload speeds are very similar to my own here in the UK where I can get 100Mbps download and less than 10Mbps upload speeds.

The initial full backup will always be a killer because of the need to upload all the data but after that, ATI doesn't do any further full backups for normal Cloud backup tasks.  Instead it uses a delta type hybrid incremental backup technique to identify only changed blocks of data to upload.

300GB + of OS data does sound very large, so I would suggest considering how you could separate this into different backup tasks.

For myself, I have Win 10 Pro 64-bit running on a HP laptop with a 128GB NVMe SSD used just for the Win OS and applications that backs up around 60 - 70GB of OS data to the Cloud, as well as to local & network locations.

All my user data, documents, photos, videos, music etc is stored on a 1TB HDD in the laptop, and I make separate backups of each category of data, allowing me to use a variety of different schedules for the backups according to how often data changes.  Music is probably the one category that changes the least for me and just goes to my local backup drives & Synology NAS drives.  Documents go to the Cloud as well as local.

Having the above approach allows me to do a faster recovery of the OS should it be needed - plus having all user data separate means I can restore the OS without worrying about losing any email or documents etc. (Email is stored on by HDD too!).

After the initial backup all backup is an incremental, so there will be a substantial reduction in time for the backup. For years I had a 100/2 Mbps cable connection which increased to 100/5 about a year ago, and more recently to 95/35.

While incremental backup are usually small, major Windows updates will lead to a one off extended backup period. As backup is block based, defragmenting a HDD can result in a one off explosion in the backup time. As you are backing up a virtual machine this may not be a worry. As I understand it SSD do not have this behaviour as the Trim command does behave in the same way.

Ian

Thanks again Steve for your suggestions. In fact your latest reply has encouraged me, at least in knowing that our upload speed out here is the same as what you're getting in the UK!

Yes, I've had others give similar advice about only backing up data, etc., as well as your solution of having the OS and programs on a separate drive. (I'm guessing that's internal, right? So you have two internal drives?) I would have loved a solution like that, but when we bought our iMac in 2017 that wasn't an option out here in SA: and with these newer Macs the HDD is an integral part of the motherboard; no more upgrading to a bigger one.

But I have to say, ever since I discovered Acronis in the early 2000's, what I've most appreciated is the ability to restore my entire computer from a single backup if I have a catastrophic crash (which I have, a couple of times!) So while I hear what you're saying, I'm not too keen on dividing it all up into separate backups; though I will think about that.

I'm therefore inclined to leave the current backup running (it's down to 4d 13h now!)—if I can! Fortunately we recently had our internet connection thoroughly checked and retuned, so I'm hoping we'll stay connected, and maintain the ±10 Mbps upload speed, until this initial backup gets done. Feel free to say it's a Quixotic hope that subsequent incremental backups will go quickly!

One question: I'm assured by the program that if I shut my computer down and restart, the backup will resume from where it left off. But what about if there's a sudden break in the internet connection? Will it do likewise, or will that mean starting again from scratch?

Thanks for your input; much appreciated!

Ian, thanks for your response, which I hadn't seen when I was replying to Steve above.

It's good to know that the subsequent incremental backups should be livable-with! About defragmenting my VM hard drive, that tool is still available in drive properties, and I think I have used it before. Seems like my Mac actually allows Windows to defragmment the portion of its hard drive that Windows is using—but I don't know the technicalities. Would love to have an SSD, though!

Steve, I am only a Windows / Linux user and have no Mac computers (other than an ancient Apple II+ in my loft).

While I do make backups to the Acronis Cloud, they would never be my primary choice when needing to do any recovery / restore but are there mainly as an extra string to the bow.

I would definitely recommend having multiple types of backups, some to local drives (USB external) and if you have any network drives or a NAS, then to there too, in addition to those to the Cloud.

Having backups of individual physical drives has always been easier for me than putting multiple drives into a single backup image.  I like the ability of being able to recover a single drive using a single backup image and keeping the size down to the minimum required etc.

Steve Smith wrote:

While I do make backups to the Acronis Cloud, they would never be my primary choice when needing to do any recovery / restore but are there mainly as an extra string to the bow.

OK, that interests me. Why would the Cloud not be your primary choice? (Acronis is always talking about how you can get your stuff from it anywhere, to any device, etc.) Is it because of the slowness of using the internet? Though, as you've said, download speeds (for restoring data) are often much faster than upload…

I'm with you about having multiple backups: for years I've had Acronis on multiple disks (I have other computers to back up as well), I've a duplicate remote backup (stored at my organisation's office), I've had a NAS unit, and I've used Mac's built-in backup software, Time Machine. I had rather hoped, though, to get rid of the multiple external drives for the duplicate local and remote backups and replace them with the Cloud, because swapping them from one machine to another and managing duplicate drives has become an increasing pain.

But I'm not ruling out your drive-by-drive backup idea. I've always only included local drives in my single Acronis backup; external drives I've been backing up separately. If I can last out till this initial backup is done, I'll see how the following incremental ones go—how time-consuming they are, whether they slow the system too much, etc.; and if the results are negative, then I'll seriously consider setting up smaller backups per local drive.

Thanks again for your advice, which is really helping my thinking on this.

OK, that interests me. Why would the Cloud not be your primary choice? (Acronis is always talking about how you can get your stuff from it anywhere, to any device, etc.) Is it because of the slowness of using the internet? Though, as you've said, download speeds (for restoring data) are often much faster than upload…

Steve, the answer really depends on where you are when you need to do a recovery?

I spent a lot of time on the road over the years and it is only more recently that broadband has become more commonly available and speeds better but this again depends on location.

I travel with a portable USB 3.1 2TB HDD drive that weighs under 200g and fits in my pocket and which has a selection of different backup images stored on it.  The drive is also a multi-purpose boot drive (using a 32GB FAT32 partition at the start) to allow me to boot into Windows 10 Install / Recovery media, or several versions of ATI including 64 & 32-bit, and some Linux distros using either UEFI or Legacy boot modes.

There is simply no competition for recovering from that portable drive in terms of speed and no need to jump through hoops to get connected to a paid WiFi service etc.

In addition, I can make new full backups on the drive in a few minutes as needed if I am doing any testing or upgrades etc. (Something I have done on my current trip in upgrading my laptop from Win 10 Home to Pro, but with backups made before & after!).

One major issue with doing a recovery from the Acronis Cloud is simply that it needs to be started from the Acronis Rescue Media after booting from that media (assuming that you cannot boot into your computer OS be that Mac OS or Windows). The rescue media has minimal, if any, support for most wireless adapters so a wired connection is needed just to connect to the Cloud, which can be problematic if your location provides only wireless access!

At home this isn't an issue as I have lots of methods of connecting to my network...!

Accessing files & folders in the Acronis Cloud isn't the issue here - that can work fine if your main OS is fully operational.  Recovering your system is a different issue!

You said: "One major issue with doing a recovery from the Acronis Cloud is simply that it needs to be started from the Acronis Rescue Media after booting from that media (assuming that you cannot boot into your computer OS be that Mac OS or Windows). The rescue media has minimal, if any, support for most wireless adapters so a wired connection is needed just to connect to the Cloud, which can be problematic if your location provides only wireless access!"

OK, I didn't know that. I've always found recovering the whole system very slow—maybe I haven't had the right external hard drives. I can well believe recovering from the cloud might be slower; and your mention of the Rescue Media and its limitations with regard to wifi are a little worrying. But let me get this clear: We have wireless internet (at the moment: hoping for fibre next year); but the situation you're talking about is the connection between the computer and the local modem—that has to be wired, am I right? So we get our internet via a cable from the antenna on the roof, and that cable is plugged into our internal modem. That modem supports wifi, but it also has ethernet ports: so if I connected my Mac (assuming the Windows VM is defunct) to the modem by ethernet cable, rather than by wifi, all should be well—the Rescue Media should boot up and connect correctly? Have I got that right?

Thanks again for your help with all of this!

Steve, the Acronis rescue media should work fine with Ethernet connections using wire to your modem / router.  Please understand though that all my experience here is purely with Windows, not with Mac, so I have never tested the Mac version of the rescue media to know of its capabilities.

I would recommend creating the rescue media on your Mac (if you haven't already) and then boot from it to see what it does support and if it can detect and use your wireless adapter to make a connection to your network or not?

Thanks for your comments, Steve. I have restored my Windows VM on a previous Mac using a Rescue CD, and there wasn't any problem with that. So with what you said above about Ethernet being OK, it all sounds fine.

But, in the meantime…  I had one small gap in my internet connection today, and the cloud backup failed! 4 days of work gone, just like that. Really??? In this day & age Acronis has no provision to recover from a brief connection failure? At the same time I was downloading something else (a bit rash, I know, but it was working)—and the download recovered fine after the outage.

Which answers my basic question, I guess: Acronis Cloud is no good to me if it fails so easily. At least until I manage to get fibre, which hopefully won't be liable to the occasional connection gaps you typically get with wireless.

I wonder what your take is on this instant failure? Normal? Or should the backup somehow have recovered?

Steve, the upload to the Cloud should be capable of resuming but it may take a time for ATI to figure out what was already stored in the cloud, what has changed since that time, and what still needs to be uploaded.

This is one of my reasons for saying earlier that keeping the backups as small as possible and splitting them into multiple separate backups is preferable to trying to do an 'all in one' backup, especially to the cloud.

I created a new cloud backup yesterday of my Windows 10 SSD drive that completed in just under 6 hours across a wireless connection for a source of nearly 60GB which was compressed to an upload of 36.5GB.

OK, it's good to hear that the cloud backup can resume. How do you go about making that happen? Mine said categorically that the backup had failed, with a big red X between the source and target icons. The only option I could see was to delete the backup. I left it like that for quite a while, hoping it would resume; but eventually when nothing happened I closed the program. Is there any hope now of getting it to resume? How would I go about doing that?

(By the way, I realised that, as you mention above, the backup was being compressed: so, calculating from the amount done and the time remaining, I worked out that its final size in the Cloud would have been round 150 GB, not 330.)

Oh, and now I see under Activity that it says "Destination is unavailable"—though my internet connection is fine now. (I did not delete the partial backup.) I don't know what that means…

Steve, not sure why you are seeing 'Destination is unavailable' unless there is a problem at the server end given your internet is OK for everything else?

See KB 4350: Acronis Backup to Cloud access ports and hostnames - for details of where all the servers are and what ports they use.

Use the above in conjunction with the Acronis Cloud Connection Verification Tool.

If you still have issues, then please open a Support Case direct with Acronis as they are the only ones with access to the server side of the Cloud support.

Thanks so much for your help, Steve—I'll follow up on your suggestions above.

Just one final question, then I'll leave you in peace! Is there any hope of resuming that interrupted backup, or should I just cut my losses at this point?

Thanks!

Just one final question, then I'll leave you in peace! Is there any hope of resuming that interrupted backup, or should I just cut my losses at this point?

Steve, I suspect that the answer depends on how far along the interrupted backup has got?

If it is well along the way, then I would try restarting it yourself, you should be able to click on the Back up now button if it has stopped retrying itself.

If it hasn't really got very far, then perhaps cutting your losses and reconsidering how the task can be split into smaller segments and separate tasks per segment, so that your individual backup size is kept as small as possible.

If you are still seeing Destination unavailable then test a new backup to the same cloud server for just a single folder and see if that can succeed?

Steve, thank you! I tried out two of your suggestions, and they succeeded. I did a single-folder backup to the cloud, and it worked perfectly. So despite the 'error' message, the destination was still accessible.

I then looked again at the failed backup—and saw that despite all the dire error messages and warnings, the "Backup Now" button was still active. So I clicked it—and it started working again! Once it had calculated the time remaining, it wasn't 6 days, like the first time round, it was only 4 hours. So it does look like it's resumed from where it left off. (Since then the time remaining has steadily risen, but it's still in hours, not days.)

Thank you for suggesting I try this—it looks like I haven't lost those 4 days of backup after all, for which I'm very grateful! (I will still look into doing smaller backups in future, but I'm just relieved right now to have salvaged this first one.)

I really appreciate your help with this.