Slow speed for machine restore from cloud
I'm using Cyber Protect Home Office to backup two machines to the Acrnois cloud.
I wanted to test a backup. But not having another machine, I started a restore onto a VMWare VM. (I had to jump through some hoops to get that to work.) The restore process said was going to take almost 20 hours to restore a cloud backup of my 300 gig C: (150 gig when backed up on the cloud )
My internet connection is 800 Mbps with 25 ms ping.
Perhaps the VM host was causing some slowdown?
But, is that kind of recovery time normal? That seems pretty useless for reasonable disaster recovery.
Are there any recommended best practices for testing restores without having a whole other identical machine available?
I'm thinking now that I may just do a full local tibx backup periodically to a secondary drive and then manually upload it to the cloud. It seems a shame not to take advantage of the built-in automatic, incremental cloud backups, but I need something that doesn't take almost a day to restore.
Thanks for the insight into using tibx files for speed compared to the cloud.
My plan is to back up to a One Drive folder that I've excluded from the Acronis backup.
And in OneDrive, I'll configure the folder as "On Demand" so the file isn't stored locally.
Does that sound like a reasonable approach, or might there be unforeseen problems?
Acronis will not backup OneDrive with Files On Demand enabled!
If using OneDrive to store Acronis backups, then you are going to hit issues with Acronis Active Protection preventing access plus each time the .tibx files are updated by the backup being run, then the whole file will be uploaded again because of how incremental backups are now consolidated within a single .tibx file.
Acronis will not backup OneDrive with Files On Demand enabled!
Darn, I was afraid there might be something like that.
Anyone have any suggestions on how to automate backups to a OneDrive-like cloud service?
Otherwise, I suppose I can write a service app that periodically checks for a new (and closed) tibx file in my backup folder and if found, transfers it to the OneDrive folder.
TomF wrote:Anyone have any suggestions on how to automate backups to a OneDrive-like cloud service?Otherwise, I suppose I can write a service app that periodically checks for a new (and closed) tibx file in my backup folder and if found, transfers it to the OneDrive folder.
For your service app, you would still need to whitelist this to Acronis Active Protection if enabled to allow access to any files being copied. You should not move such files.
If you want to be able to backup directly to OneDrive or other cloud services, then you may need to look at other backup solutions where this is offered. Acronis only permit backups to its own Cloud service.
Thanks, Steve,
I think what I'd do is schedule an Acronis full backup of C: to another drive, say D: every Sunday night.
My service (and I suspect it could be a scheduled .bat file) would run every Monday, copying that file to a OneDrive folder.
Do you see any problem with that?
Tom, try running a simulation for the service / bat file and see if it puts up any messages from AAP - one issue is that it will ask if you want to whitelist one of the core Windows apps which is used much more widely than just your service or bat file! Any automated actions involving Acronis files (.tibx or .tib) is going to be intercepted by AAP unless the application doing the action is whitelisted and allowed to run by AAP.
You could try using Robocopy to mirror your backup folder to OneDrive and see what that shows?
Does AAP actually popup a dialog box when it sees someone touching the file?
Yes, it should do so, especially if it is blocking the action.
Thanks for your suggestions on how to try using OneDrive, Steve.
You know what? I'm giving up on the cloud backup.
It's just not worth the hassle. I had such high hopes for Acronis' software. But the amount of time I've spent fighting Itheir app, getting bad support, and being disappointed isn't worth it. I can terminate my cloud subscription and buy a few 1 or 2 TB external drives and schedule a full backup to them weekly (using Acronis software) swapping the drives out at a neighbor's house. (Unless our entire neighborhood gets hit by a meteor, that's sufficiently "off-site" for me.) :-)
Everyone's needs and skills are different. But no one needs the hassle I've gone through. Maybe if I'd looked for this forum earlier, I could've avoided getting so frustrated.
1. The Acronis programmers seem to have never heard of an hourglass or giving the user feedback when something is taking more than a second. I frequently sit staring at the screen for five or ten seconds, wondering if their software froze up or if perhaps I missed clicking on the target option I thought I did. How 20th century of them.
2. One machine here makes incremental backups every night, even though the Options screen clearly calls for once a week. I even created a new backup from scratch to try to fix that, but the same problem persisted.
3. The Options screen's "Save as default" checkbox seems to do nothing, so I end up having to hand enter Exclusions and notifications parameters every time I define a new backup. (Why they wouldn't allow me to paste a list of exclusions is beyond me.)
4. I've read here on the forum about speed problems when opening a tibx file that has a lot of incremental backups. Jeesh, what other surprises await me?
Sure, many of the above cosmetic things. But, it's kind of discouraging when an MVP here says,
"I believe your [slow] result is typical of most users who have reported such here in these pages. Your plan to have a local backup on hand is sound and what we MVP's practice as well."
Heck, I tried for weeks to get some answers on the speed issue in a support ticket. But all I got was one guy after another who read a script to me, sent me links, and never provided any help. I gave up calling support on the other issues above, figuring I'd get the same unresponsiveness. They're more than happy to leave a ticket open if I "need more time" but what's the point of doing that if their follow-up the next week doesn't provide any more help than the previous interactions? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I moderate other forums, so I know better than to rant like this. And I don't mean to burn bridges. Sure, maybe the problem is some shortcomings on my part. It's just that I expected so much more of their product.
<end of rant>
Thanks again for your suggestions on Robocopy. But, I'm done trying to engineer a solution to a product that doesn't do what I need.
I guess my only question is whether anyone here has actually restored a machine snapshot from an Acronis backup? Does it actually work? Does the machine actually boot and work? Because THAT'S the only advantage that I can see Acronis has right now over more simple backups.
Tom
Tom, we hear your comments and both agree with them and understand your frustration! Acronis support frustrates even the most patient of us, myself included, especially when the default response is a shopping list of logs, dumps, traces etc - often with no obvious relevance to the issue being reported but without which nothing moves at all!
The MVP's have raised this directly with Acronis but have seen no sign of any real change in their approach, which is a great pity because they have got a premium product which is being let down by poor support and a lack of listening skills!
In terms of both ATI and ACPHO, and your question about recovery - the answer is Yes! This does work and produce a working / bootable system << providing the rules are followed!! >>.
I have created several videos recently that are on my YouTube Channel that you are welcome to look at and which show some successful recovery operations.
Returning to the issue of Cloud performance, I have to state that I do not use the Acronis Cloud other than for testing purposes and only then by virtue of being gifted a subscription by Acronis as an MVP. For my own backups, I use a mix of internal, external and NAS destinations for storing these.
Hey, Steve, Thanks for the confirmation that I'm not alone.
Your videos look helpful. I'm going to follow along with the VM restore one carefully with a local backup.
Do you care to elaborate on what you mean by << providing the rules are followed!! >>?
Cloud recovery can take a long time. I did one of similar size yesterday, and while it finished much faster than I expected it still takes a long time. I was doing the recovery to an empty disk which may explain why it was so fast. I suspect when you do it to the with data on it, it takes a bit longer as it appears to do a block by block recover; it only recovers blocks that are different to those on the drive. The time taken also seems to reflect the number of backup slices that have to be accessed.
In my case the recovery apparently worked successfully, but, it did not fix the the problem I am having. Could be power supply problem.
Ian
TomF wrote:Hey, Steve, Thanks for the confirmation that I'm not alone.
Your videos look helpful. I'm going to follow along with the VM restore one carefully with a local backup.
Do you care to elaborate on what you mean by << providing the rules are followed!! >>?
When recovering it is important that any rescue media being used to boot the PC is booted in the same BIOS mode as used by Windows, i.e. if you have backed up a UEFI boot PC, that you boot the rescue media in UEFI boot mode to perform the recovery and not booted in Legacy mode. That is the key rule.
Booting a Legacy boot OS backup in UEFI mode isn't a problem but will migrate the PC from Legacy to UEFI boot mode.
Other than the boot mode, the only other key factor is that the OS backup must include the hidden / system partition, especially the EFI System one (or System Reserved for Legacy) as these store the Windows BCD information needed to boot Windows.
Steve Smith wrote:When recovering it is important that any rescue media being used to boot the PC...
Very helpful, Steve. THANKS.