System Clean-up (TI H 2010)

Hello Mercurio,

I understand your question and will do my best to give you a clear explanation.

Please make sure that you are using the latest build of the program. Check it in Help -> About. You can always download the latest build of the program from your account under Registered Products.

First of all I would recommend you to check the drives for errors and bad blocks as it can be the reason for a long delay:

- Go to the Command Prompt (Start -> Run -> cmd)

- Enter the command: "chkdsk DISK: /r" (where DISK is the partition letter you need to check) for every partition that is visible in My Computer. Please note, that checking the C: drive may require you to reboot the machine.

The source of the issue can also be in Disk Clean-Up running while the backup process and that is why. Once Acronis software initializes the backup process of a volume (a single partition or a dynamic disk), Acronis Snapshot Manager flushes the file system mounted to that volume temporarily freezing all the operations on the system volume. Immediately thereafter, the Snapshot Manager driver creates a point-in-time view of the system volume and a bitmap describing the used sectors on this volume. Once the bitmap is created, the filter driver unfreezes the I/O operations on the system volume. It generally takes just several seconds to create a point-in-time view of the volume. After that, the operating system continues working as the imaging process is under way.

Acronis software reads the sectors on the system volume according to the created bitmap. Once a sector is read, the appropriate bit in the bitmap is reset. In its turn, the Acronis driver continues working to hold the point-in-time view of the system volume. Whenever the driver sees a write operation directed at the system volume, it checks whether these sectors are already backed-up, if they are not, the driver saves the data on the sectors that will be overwritten to a special buffer created by the software, then it allows the sectors to be overwritten. Acronis software backs up the sectors from the special buffer, so that all the sectors of the point-in-time view of the system volume will be backed up intact. Meanwhile, the operating system continues working and you will not notice anything unusual in the operating system functionality.

As you can see after the program creates bitmap it checks for used and unused sectors. In case clean-up utility running it slow down the whole process.

Let us know if you need further assistance.

Dmitry gives a detailed and useful description of the Disk Clean-Up running while the backup process is running.

I ran across the following from Kevin Beaver's Security Blog: http://securityonwheels.blogspot.com/2008/03/ever-wonder-how-real-time-…
of Tuesday, March 18, 2008. I'm wondering if this is describing another facet of the same process???

[Tuesday, March 18, 2008]
Ever wonder how real-time imaging software works?
I use Acronis TrueImage Echo for my backups. It's a really handy way of performing live backups and I hear from a lot of folks how they love it. If you've ever wondered how the software is actually able to make backups of the live Windows system without having to reboot into a DOS-like interface, here's how it's done. This is from Acronis support engineer Michael Lee - re-printed with permission:

The SnapAPI module is in charge of all I/O operations on the hard disk of Acronis software working in Windows. It also allows to create backups under running Windows with a lot of files being open for reading and writing without any necessity to reboot the computer in DOS or any other special mode.

Once Acronis True Image initializes the backup process of a volume (which logically corresponds to a single partition, if there are no Dynamic Disks), Acronis Snapshot Manager flushes the file system mounted to that volume temporarily freezing all the operations on the system volume. Immediately thereafter, the Snapshot Manager driver creates a point-in-time view of the system volume and a bitmap describing the used sectors on this volume. Once the bitmap is created, the filter driver unfreezes the I/O operations on the system volume. It generally takes just several seconds to create a point-in-time view of the volume. After that, the operating system continues working as the imaging process is under way.

Acronis True Image reads the sectors on the system volume according to the created bitmap. Once a sector is read, the appropriate bit in the bitmap is reset. In its turn, the Acronis driver continues working to hold the point-in-time view of the system volume. Whenever the driver sees a write operation directed at the system volume, it checks whether these sectors are already backed-up, if they are not, the driver saves the data on the sectors that will be overwritten to a special buffer created by the software, then it allows the sectors to be overwritten.

Acronis True Image backs up the sectors from the special buffer, so that all the sectors of the point-in-time view of the system volume will be backed up intact. Meanwhile, the operating system continues working and the user will not notice anything unusual in the operating system functionality.

Helli Dmitry,

I'm not running backups on the disk, or any disk, while I'm cleaning its free space and the disk is not in use by other processes.