How to get Backups done faster?

Would help if you provide more details. NAS, how connected? UNC share or Mapped drive(s)? External USB 3.0, How connected, front panel connector? Brand of USB 3.0 drive? USB 3.0 Enclosure type/brand/specs?

What version of TI are you using, latest build? If latest build did you upgrade previous install or do a clean install of latest build?

Version of Windows, 32bit or 64 bit?

PC specs, processor, memory, chipset, drive controllers, etc.?

All important, it is impossible to troubleshoot issues like yours without complete spec details on all hardware/software involved.

Be absolutely certain THAT THE OPTION is NOT CHECKED for
"Run the backup only when computer is idle."

How to view or set somewhat hidden advanced scheduled backup settings.

Hello

I try to answer as much of Your Questions as possible.

NAS: Armor 1.8 TB with Seagate-Drives mapped as Drive S via Gb-LAN over a managed switch

System: Windows 8.1 pro 64 bit german version; i7 3770T with 16 GB Memory, 250 GB SSD
Intel 7 Series / 216

USB-Drive: Intenso 2 TB, no compression attached via USB 3.0

TI 2014 Premium, installed about 2 week ago with latest download, build 6673 full version

Security Suite: F-Secure

Do You need more?

I think the PC and its peripherals have a lot of power, but it seems that TI doesn't use them.

Piet

I will check, when it's done. After over 24 hours I dont want to abort it now. I hope it will be ready within next hours.
But what will run on a PC when it is working with less than 3% cpu. Acronis (2 Tasks) are on top of the task manager.
(Acronis True Image Home and Acronis True Image Service)
Thanks for Your advice.

First, take Grovers advice and make sure the run backup only at idle is not checked. Looking at your system specs you have some decent hardware and should be getting better throughput than what you indicate. The managed switch you mentioned would be of some concern, can you take that out of the equation to see if that helps things or not? It could be that there are settings for your installed NIC in the PC that are holding things up. Make certain that all devices at configured for GB transfer. I would suggest running Windows network troubleshooting wizard and see if it can detect any problems.

Cable are another place to look for problems, to operate at full potential all cables need to be top end products with good shielding and as far away from power cords and other electrical interference as possible. So have a look at that as well.

I suspect you have a router in the mix as well if not then that is a problem. Presuming you have a router try rebooting the router and see if that may help. Check to make sure that all drivers are current for ALL hardware involved. Check for possible firmware updates for your hardware as well. Check your bios settings and make sure USB, storage, and network settings are where and what they should be.

Got your work cut out for you, these types of issues are rarely ever easy to solve. Let us know what you come up with.

Hello

The differential Backup took about 2 days (360MB).
I had a look on the parameters.
"Run the backup only when computer is idle." is not checked!

Meantime I rebooted my computer an now I have this problem:
If I want to get into the adjustments (Einstellungen) AIT breaks down.
Its only in one of these backups, that are defined. It is the one with the NAS.
It seems that some paremeters cannot be handled by AIT.

[Window Title]
Acronis True Image Home
[Main Instruction]
Acronis True Image Home funktioniert nicht mehr
[Content]
Das Programm wird aufgrund eines Problems nicht richtig ausgeführt. Das Programm wird geschlossen und Sie werden benachrichtigt, wenn eine Lösung verfügbar ist.
[Programm schließen]

Some ideas?

Peter

[Window Title]
Acronis True Image Home
[Main Instruction]
Acronis True Image Home does not work anymore
[Content]
The program is not properly executed because of a problem. The program will close and you will be notified if a solution is available.
[Close Program]

My suggestion would be to run the TI Cleanup utility and re-install TrueImage

Also try to move a large file (video, or TIB) using Windows explorer and look at the transfer speed. What do you get?

Are you backing up a network share from the NAS to a local USB? I guess you are using a file backup then?

Hello GroverH

Yes I will deinstall and re-install Acronis and test it again.

Peter

Hello Pat L

I copied a tib-file 4 GB from NAS to my USB3-Drive. It took about 4 to 5 minutes,
that is about 15 MByte/ sec (120Mbits/s)

I'm backing up a Share of NAS via my PC to an external USB-Drive. Yes and I am using the file-backup-utility (Datei-Backup).
The share ist known als drive s: on my PC.

Peter

Hello

I just re-installed ATI and added the old Backups.
Then I made the adjustments and just started the diffential backup of the NAS.
Let's see what happens .....

Peter

Hello
New status.

It started very well. Computing remaining time was done within a few minutes. ATI told me, it would take about 56 minutes. I was very pleased.

Yesterday eve, he was working quite good, but remaining time gets bigger and bigger. This morning ATI stated, that it would take 1 1/2 day more to finish and it seems that only a third was done.

A hint: the data on that NAS is strongly devided into folders, the pathes are deep and some filenames are quite long. Cause of this matter, I can't use the normal copy of windows. There is a limit of filenamelength (incl. pathes). Could this have an influence to this horrible execution time?
Is there a possibility to have a deeper look in what the programm does? Every minute it states a lot of directories on the screen. I see that its working and it is much faster than I myself could be, but this ist a System with a lot of computing power. Acronis tooks about 20 % cpu at its start, now it takes about 0,7%. At its start it reads about 130 to 150 Mbits/s from the NAS, now its about 0,3 Mbits/sec.

Main memory use is low at about 2,4 GB of 16. Systemvolume (SSD) use is under 1%, so it is impossible that the task is swapping. I really see no bottleneck on the system. Some problems with Windows 8.1? More and more questions comming up.

While writing this post, estimated remaining time went up for another 1/2 hour. Its rising faster than You can see.

Sorting is normally a computing problem. The bigger the data, the much bigger the computing time. But then it should take more cpu over the time. ATI behaves the other way round. It consumes less end less cpu and ressources over time. What does it do? Whats going wrong?

Piet

edit:

reading my own post again ...

Is there a function in Windows 8.1 that reduces "heavy" tasks over time? Windows 8 was build according to mobile needs. Does it try to save "battery"? I'm working on the desktop of Windows, but perhaps Windows sends ATI into the background. That might be normal, if You use the "Kacheloberfläche" (Metro)?

And there ist another new impact in windows. Windows is nowadays designed to act as fast as possible on userInteraction. ATI works and works and needs no user interaction. This might be another reason for windows to drop ATI on an lower level.

edit:

I tested different stats. No Security Software running. No Firewall running. No indexing for Search ...

remaining time still grows.

I stopped this backup.

I will make more tests. Now trying to manipulate RAM-Usage.

edit:

my report on a new try:

ATI startet with about 20 % cpu reading from the backupdrive via USB.

Then it took between 20 and 60% of the cpu still readiung and computing remaining time.

After about 7 Minutes it statet 17 hours, 4hours, 3 hours, 2 hours until about 1 1/2 hour.

And it startet reading from the NAS with rates over 100 Mbits/s.

After about half an hour everthings working fine.

After 45 Minutes CPU drops more an more, remaining time grows slowly.

After 1 hour CPU is less than 1%, remaining time grows faster. Now it seems that this is the point of "I will never end".

(Whay and what does Acronis talk to the router? Acronis.exe sends Broadcasts to 239.255.255.250 (SSDP Simple Service Discovery Protocol).

edit:

I thought, that perhaps my existing full-backup has its problems, so I started a new full backup, but I stopped it after some hours also. Why? Because it ist getting slower and slower. ATI sunk under 1% of CPU and drives were not in use.

Now I made up my mind to test it with a small Backup. I took a realy small share of the NAS as source and the external usb-drive as destination.
I tell You, AIT does not work. It seems to be asleep it doesn't take CPU, it doesn't use the drives.

Now I'm quite shure, that it is a problem with Windows 8.1. I will do some more tests.

- abort the small Backup, stop ATI and start the small one again

- abort, kill all ATI in the process list and start the small one again

- reboot machine an start it again

I see that you have narrowed this down to a USB 3.0 problem. I note interestingly that you question if in fact there is a bug in Win 8.1 causing this. I recall a bug involving slow data transfer rate with USB 2.0 in early releases of Win 7. Could be a carryover I suppose.

I strongly suggest that you update your host controller drivers even if you have the latest versions already installed, uninstall them and reinstall these drivers. I would also suggest that you fully investigate your external drive. If this drive happens to be a WD Passport drive there is a firmware revision for those drives that deals with a USB 3.0 issue that the drive controller has. That revision is purported to be none destructive but in your case since you obviously have backups of the data that should not be an issue anyway. Had a poster some time back with a WD Passport that would drop out completely during backups whom updated the firmware and solved their problem.

Another item I take note with is your statement about folder structure being as you say deep. I really do not see that as an issue but interesting because I ponder if it might be that you are backing up a huge amount of data that is in small chunks, say in the 4kb range. If you are that could impact transfer speed in a big way and I can see that causing a slow down over time as you have indicated. Disk drives inherently do not handle small files as well as large ones in reading and writing such data. There are ways to compensate for that to a degree but those would require a reformat of your disk.

Not sure if any of this will help but hopefully something herein will prove to be an avenue to some level of success.

I too have a i7 with 16GB. However, my disks are all internal... 1.5TB C: drive and 2.0TB D: drive.

I've found that my full image backups run a whole lot faster by booting and running TI from my Recovery Disk. This also allays my fears of maybe something not getting backed up or not backed up properly because Windows may have a file/program open or locked as it's about to get copied.

Anyway, it seems to work for me.

Yes, that is understandable as with the system disk being live when the OS is up and running requires a certain amount of resource overhead. It is also a wise choice to perform backups of disks that are not live for the very reason you point out.

When backing up across the network, split your archive to no more than 10GB per chunk. Windows has a problem copying large files across the network: when I start a backup, it runs at around 275Mb/s but as the file grows larger it slows down, finally ending up around 30Mb/s (gigabit connection). This is true of all Windows network file transfers.. it has nothing to do with Acronis.