Restore more than one version of a single file in one sitting?
Is it by any chance possible to restore more than one version of a given file in one go or in one sitting?
I currently have this fat 2.58 TB image backup file that Acronis True Image 2021 actively backs up my entire system to, and somewhere in there is a 50 KB file of interest. I just have to fish it out.
I say "in one sitting" because as of right now, I have clicked on the "Recovery" tab in Backup section and Acronis is reporting "please wait" and my stopwatch is currently at 08:16 minutes and counting. This is not the first time I'm doing this, I'm just timing it to confirm what I already know with great certainty, which is that it will take about 12 minutes for Acronis to finish thinking.
This is an old issue, it's no news to me, and I'm afraid it's not something that will be fixed anytime soon. This deserves a discussion of it's own. But it's the reason I'm asking the question above. Because I'm sick and tired of waiting 12 minutes for Acronis to respond. Only to see it land on the "Entire PC" tab, because in it's rightful mind it thinks I want to do a full system restoration, which is why it feels the need to burn 12 minutes of my time, for each time I want to restore a different version of the same file. Because it needs to go out of its way preparing and verifying and whatnot for a full system restoration.
So to restore 6 different versions of 1 file, it takes me 6 x 12 minutes = 72 minutes. Each restoration is one sitting, because while I do have a very good attention span and I can concentrate for long hours on one task, I don't have the nerves to sit and glare in a blank screen for 12 minutes each time I wait for Acronis to respond. I'm not even taking into account the 2 minutes of additional penalty it takes for me to switch to the "Files" tab which is where I need to be to restore a single file. So guess what... all that time wasted waiting for Acronis to prepare the "Entire PC" view for me so I can restore the entire system... well I don't need that! (Stupid!)
How do you guys put up with Acronis? How large is your Acronis backup file? How long does it take you to arrive at "Files" once you click the "Recovery" tab?
What am I paying for when I buy into Acronis True Image? This software feels more and more like a bloatware from late 2005. Decades behind! Main difference now vs. then is that it has a newly polished UI elements, but the UX is horrible, and performance equally so. Plus it's full of bugs and glitches that make it unusable.
I just clocked it at 11:39 minutes. That's the time it took for me within this hour to go from "Recovery" tab and for the "Entire PC" tab (view) to fully load. I can't abort this! I have to sit and wait for Acronis to finish thinking and load up that view which I did not ask for and don't want to load at all. But I can't click anywhere else until it has loaded. Then you add another 2 minutes it takes to go from "Entire PC" to "Files" (sometimes less). That's about 14 minutes... for each version of the file I want to restore!? Now you tell me what I am paying for?... this is a horrible software!
Now look at this view, I cannot select more than one version of this given file at once. I have to take a second, third, fourth turn, and so on, and wait 14 minutes each turn to fish out a different version of the same file. Why have you not improved on this design in over 10 years??? That's how long I have used True Image.
Ditto to Bruno's comments, I never use and would never recommend using 'Entire PC' on any system with multiple disk drives. My own disk backups are only a fraction of the 2.5 TB you are telling us about, none are larger than 100 GB, and even that would be for a backup chain including both a Full and a number of Incremental backup slices.
The larger the file, the slower ATI will be to process that file and to navigate through the contents.
See KB 65547: Acronis True Image 2021: how to restore files from a backup (Windows) and scroll down the page to 'How to restore files in File Explorer' which you should find easier to use if only wanting to recover some files, allowing you to use normal Copy & Paste commands.
BrunoC wrote:Samir, the MVPs here often recommend making separate disk/partition backups of each disk as opposed to lumping them all in the Entire PC backup. There are many advantages, e.g., the files are smaller and quicker to recover from; errors that may occur on a disk that could prevent the backup will not affect the backups of other disks; one of the main things we back up for is to protect against disk failure, which would generally occur on one disk only.
Well that's not what True Image thinks is the right thing to do. The very first thing it does after installation is try to lump everything in "Entire PC" image backup. Of course, that's OK for people that don't have tons of data and partitions like I do. But I agree that it may be a good idea to avoid this behavior. I will change this the next time I run a full backup.
errors that may occur on a disk that could prevent the backup will not affect the backups of other disks
Can you please explain this part? I didn't get that.
Thanks Steve, I will try the File Explorer approach.
I understand that I have a quite large data set to backup, and yes, ATI is slower when you work with such large data sets. To that end I went on to clean up a few incremental backups, but that did not help much. Although True Image 2021 is noticeably faster at this (massive data sets) than True Image 2020 was. I know because the old version used to completely give up on me, and one time I remember clearly when I needed to restore something important, from bootable media, it made my backup disk completely unusable because of missing drivers if I recall correctly, and doing it inside Windows obviously did not work. I had to strip away a lot of excess data (incremental backups) before I could recover using ATI inside Windows.
I'm still frustrated why they don't let me select more than one version of the same file from within ATI. I'm sure the UI can be designed in a different way that would allow for multiple choice version selections per file (or set of files).
I'm still frustrated why they don't let me select more than one version of the same file from within ATI. I'm sure the UI can be designed in a different way that would allow for multiple choice version selections per file (or set of files).
I suspect that most users have never needed an option to do this so Acronis have never been given reason to consider including it.
Using Explorer, you should be able to open different windows for separate incremental backup slices, then use copy & paste for the specific files you want from those windows.
Samir wrote:BrunoC wrote:errors that may occur on a disk that could prevent the backup will not affect the backups of other disks
Can you please explain this part? I didn't get that.
What I meant was that if all disks are lumped into one big backup and you encounter a disk error, it could prevent the entire backup from succeeding. But if each disk is a separate backup then only the backup for the disk with the error would fail and backups for other disks would succeed.
To expand on the comment by Bruno ref disk errors and their impact.
If you use 'Entire PC' and have multiple disk drives, then that whole task will fail if a disk error is encountered on a single partition or drive, especially if the error requires a user response.
If you backup each disk (or partition) separately, then only the task dealing with the disk or partition giving an error would be impacted, all other tasks for other disks or partitions would still complete successfully.
Backups of individual partitions should only be considered when these are not directly related to the Windows OS, i.e. having a separate data or backup partition. For the OS drive, the backup source should include the hidden / system partitions along with the OS partition, so the EFI and Recovery partitions plus C:
I see what you mean now. Thanks Bruno, and thanks Steve! I will try doing my backups on a one to one basis going forward (one disk to one image backup). Worse still is if the backup file on the backup disk gets corrupted. That's even more critical I think. So I can see that there are merits to backing up disks or partitions individually to separate backup files.
I tried the File Explorer approach. It is as fast as I would expect, and then a little more, which means it takes about 1:30 minutes to open the TIBX file. But then traversing the directory tree becomes a real test of patience. It can take up between 1 to 2 minutes to get to the next child directory. So I like that it's fast at opening the TIBX file (equally fast or more so than clicking on "Files" tab in the ATI interface) but I don't like that I have to take a short tea break between each new directory I enter (despite the fact that I like tea). For comparison, traversing directories in ATI interface is instant once I get to the "Files" tab. So give or take maybe 4 minutes, I would say this approach is just as bad, or just a tad bit better than the ATI interface. It depends on where you need to go in the file system once you have that TIBX file open in File Explorer, if the file you need is not buried too deep in the file system then you will recover it faster. So I'm afraid I will have to sit this one through.
But the real problem here is in part me, because I have lumped all the disks and partitions into one big backup file. I do appreciate your feedback on this! I will change this going forward. The second part is the inability of ATI designers to realize that they need to let me decide if I want the "Entire PC" or "Files" view to load, before they load anything. I understand that it can take a lot of time to process 2.58 TB of data, I don't blame ATI for that. I do however blame it (or them) for not letting me decide where I want to be within the program. It's just unfortunate that it so happens that I have a lot of data to load and ATI wants to help me restore everything, when all I need is a single file.
Samir, I can understand your frustration at the design implemented by the developers but I believe that they have taken this approach to help less experienced users take what is almost a click and go approach, where most users only have a single drive PC.
When you create a new backup task, then hover over the Source panel, you will see a message as shown below inviting the user to 'Change source' rather than accept the default 'Entire PC' selection. I always do this because the default will include my 2TB HDD along with my main NVMe M.2 SSD OS drive and result in nearly 1TB of backup data being selected instead of under 100GB for the SSD only! I create separate backups for the 2 x 1TB partitions on the HDD as these change at a different frequency to the OS SSD!
Samir, I can understand your frustration at the design implemented by the developers but I believe that they have taken this approach to help less experienced users take what is almost a click and go approach, where most users only have a single drive PC.
I believe you're right Steve. It would seem they (Acronis) did not anticipate someone making 2.58 TB "Entire PC" backups. With disk sizes getting bigger, even for single disk laptop PCs, I think they should seek to do better in terms of performance. As I recall it, performance of ATI was better when the old TIB format was still used.
I create separate backups for the 2 x 1TB partitions on the HDD as these change at a different frequency to the OS SSD!
You know, that's a very good point! Most of my disks and partitions are rarely modified, most of them are just used for storage.
I've been waiting for over 15 minutes now to open a slice from January 5 using File Explorer. Previously it only took about 8 minutes to grab a version of the file I want from a slice from January 6. So the time it takes seems to vary highly when using the File Explorer, and File Explorer also becomes unresponsive sometimes. So I can't wait till I can throw this all in the bin and start fresh with a new backup scheme.
So 48 hours later and I finally have all the versions of the file that I wanted to recover, and I have set up my new backup schemes, all 10 of them, one for every partition (or full disk for single partition disks).
Thanks Bruno and Steve for pointing me in the right direction. I sure hope this will allow me to restore single files faster in the future. Sitting and waiting 14 minutes for the program to go from one section to another... on repeat... is no fun. You completely lose track of what you were doing, and what version you were supposed to restore next.
I can already see another benefit of this setup, namely I no longer have to run one lengthy all-day backup operation when doing a "full" backup of the "entire PC". I can now spread that work over several days. It means that I can take a break, without pausing the operation if I want to put the computer to sleep. I have already backed up the system disk and two others. Remaining seven will have to wait for the next day, I need my computer to work at its best tonight (video rendering). In fact I have spread the different partition backups across the week almost evenly, one partition backup a day, with exception for Monday where I do two extra backups (I should probably move that to a Friday).
The reason I wanted to restore multiple versions of the same file is because I have accidentally made unwanted changes to an important Excel file and I have not caught the error early on and I'm not sure when the error was introduced. So now I have to time travel and trace back my changes across several versions, and then resolve the error and merge back to current version (not looking forward to it, at all, but it has to be done). (I still wish I could have just selected the versions of interest and restore them all in one big bang. If Acronis is reading, please add that to your ice box.)
Glad to read of your progress here Samir and congratulations on your perseverance in getting your files back and making a fresh start with your backups!
For comparison, it only takes 22 seconds now to go from "Recovery" (via "Entire PC") to "Files" tab for the system disk backup (Samsung NVMe SSD). The same measurement is 26 seconds for the storage disk (WD Red HDD) that contains the Excel file I wanted to restore/recover. (Apparently SSD vs. HDD performance is not to blame.)
Samir, nice to hear you're in a better place. I sympathize with the Excel issue. I had to do something similar.
You said you made 10 separate backup tasks, using a separate task for each partition. Although keeping each disk as a separate task is preferrable, separating the partitions may be overkill, especially if we're talking about the small system partitions, etc. For recovery of a disk failure, it may be better to have all the partitions in a single backup file. You don't indicate how many disks you have.
Separating partitions is a useful exercise if an error continually occurs on a disk backup as the error can sometimes be isolated to a partition, giving you a chance to more easily find and repair the error.
You said you made 10 separate backup tasks, using a separate task for each partition. Although keeping each disk as a separate task is preferrable, separating the partitions may be overkill, especially if we're talking about the small system partitions, etc. For recovery of a disk failure, it may be better to have all the partitions in a single backup file. You don't indicate how many disks you have.
Separating partitions is a useful exercise if an error continually occurs on a disk backup as the error can sometimes be isolated to a partition, giving you a chance to more easily find and repair the error.
No, we're not talking about the partitions that are on the main system disk. Things like EFI partition, boot partition and so on. I used to care about these things and manually partition them myself. Nowadays I just let Windows handle it for me whenever installing or reinstalling Windows. So all that stuff, the entire Windows disk is in a single Acronis backup file.
I have 4 disks installed in total. The system disk has its usual two or three partitions, 499 MB, 99 MB and 465 GB. This is the Samsung NVMe SSD disk. The last one is the system and boot partition and mounted on C drive letter. I have two 1 TB disks that I use for storing my videos and photos. They are both WD Caviar Black disks. I have two partitions on one and only one partition on the other disk. Then I have another 4 TB WD Caviar Red disk that holds 7 partitions, with the largest one taking up 642 GB and the smallest one is only 13.7 GB. So for that Red disk I saw an immediate benefit of splitting the partitions up in different tasks rather than bundling them in one task. That disk is surprisingly fast for a mechanical HDD but it's not fast enough for frequent reading when you do backups on that large amount of data.