Performance Impact of Continuous Backup
Hello
Can anyone comment on the performance impact of ATI Home 2010's continuous backup feature? Memory usage, CPU, etc?
Are there certain tasks when it's better to disable continuous backup, such as video editing?
Thank you
I haven't made any attempt at measuring the impact. But I can say that I don't notice it running. I have an external USB drive set as storage, and nonstop activated on my system partition. There is some chugging after rebooting, since it runs through everything looking for changes. But it seems that once it's up and running, it monitors changes and doesn't need to do any full run through.
If your need is to run it on a data drive with huge files and plenty of changes occurring, I would wait for someone else to respond. Or just grab the trial and test. Though technically I wouldn't expect even video editing to cause a lot of file changes until you're ready to export the finished project?
Thanks for the observations. I'm wondering if anyone runs Non-Stop Backup on a laptop and is there a noticeable impact on battery life?
I'm running on a Toshiba Laptop, The performance is awful. NSB appears to "lock" the partitions at system startup so I can't do anything for at least 10 minutes. After that everything works fine. I uninstalled ATIH 2010 for a bit and experienced no issues. I reinstalled ATIH 2010 and things were fine. Then I started NSB and bang - major performance issues.
Don't use it.
The impact is not too bad. As has been noted the initial boot-up activity is a pain, the only only other time I have noticed an impact is after installing something or making changes to the protected partition, I then get a brief, perhaps 10 seconds, where the keyboard and mouse response lags badly, presumably whist the new data is added to NSB storage.
That is works on someone else's machine is no assurance that it will work on yours. You should try it for free before you buy it. NSB performance is mixed, from acceptable to unacceptable. Perhaps in a later version NSB will be debugged. Acronis comes out with a new versin every year with added features. Unfortunately, history seems to show that this is clearly not enough to to fully debug the features.
Since your question can really only be answered in a forum by anecdotes, here's mine. When I first ran it, it was awful. But since then, the impact is so slight that I've wondered whether it was still actually doing anything (I tested it; it is). I suspect that it will give most users a huge hit while it makes the first backup and then less during normal use. Normal will of course vary by user and machine.
My system is a ThinkPad T61p (Windows 7 Pro x64, 4GB RAM, 2.5GHz CPU) backing up to a 7200 RPM 3.5" 1 TB hard drive in a USB 2.0 dock. I typically have Outlook and various program editors (Zend Studio, Dreamweaver) and other applications (Photoshop, Matlab) depending on the current project. I have told it to exclude the virtual hard drives used by virtual machines running in VirtualBox, but it is having to back up at least two large (>1GB) Outlook .pst files which change about every 15 minutes.
Re: battery life, I don't know. My notebook is docked 90% of the time and the external hard drive stays here when it isn't. ATI 2010 seems to have improved settings for just waiting when a backup drive isn't available, by the way.