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DemonData.swapFile.dat eating up all my IO

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After countless hours tracking down why my computer ever few minutes slows to a crawl I've narrowed it down to an Acronis issue. This isn't the first time I've caught Acronis wasting my computer resources. Why is my backup software, a scheduled at night process, doing anything during non-scheduled time?!?!?

About every 10 mins my RAID array starts thrashing like crazy, my system slows to a crawl. Resource Manager reports 60-100MB/sec of IO (my max throughput). My keyboard output would slow so bad as to show about a character every few seconds. If I am not even on the desktop, but streaming a moving from my computer to my Amazon Fire Stick or Google Chomecast the movie starts stuttering for about 10 secs.

I only have two backup processes that run (1) overnight every night, and (2) overnight on Sundays. I am rarely on when this happens and I get success emails in the morning.

I can't figure out why Acronis is doing anything. I don't see any interface to list tasks Acronis is doing at the moment. I've done the following:
* Eliminated non-stop backup process by stopping and disabling the non-stop backup service. (I've also not enabled this feature.)
* Eliminated the sync feature by pausing syncs in UI, then disabling the service. I also don't have anything to Sync. The 1 default sync folder is empty.

So about ever 10mins, according to the Win7 Resource Manager a flood of DemonData.swapFile tmp files are created in c:\users\guru\appdata\local\temp but the PID is listed as the ntkernel process (process #4). However, SysInternals Process Explorer shows that the TruImage.exe processing is referencing these files as well. I am guessing a TruImage driver in the ntkernel is creating the actual files as directed by TruImage.exe which is then opening the files. TruImage is sustaining an average 12.5% cpu usage on a quad core i7-3820 which for a process that should be doing nothing is *a lot* of cpu.

I have rebooted a number of times. This has been going on for weeks and perhaps longer but I think is getting gradually worse.

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In Windows 7, open Task Manager. You can do this by clicking the start button on the task bar and typing task in the search box then choose View running tasks with Task Manager. Once open click on the Services tab and scroll through the list and find VSS. Once you find it the status column should say Stopped. If it does say Stopped keep the Task Manager open and wait for the next cycle of I/O to begin. When that happens does VSS status now show Running?

If VSS begins running when your sudden bursts of I/O occur then the VSS service is at least part of the problem. To test if killing the VSS service makes the problem stop you can left click on VSS to select it then, right click on the selection and choose stop service. This should suffice for a quick temporary fix and also prove that that action remedies the I/O issue.

For a more permanent fix you can disable the VSS service by clicking the start button on the task bar and typing services.msc in the search box, select and open the services.msc link when it appears, once open scroll through the list of services and look for Volume Shadow Copy. Once found left click on the service to select it, right click and choose properties, in the resulting window you will see a drop down Startup Type box. click on the arrow button on the right side of the drop down box and choose Disable.