Acronis 2016 Shortcomings

Robert,

Have you fully vetted and tested your hardware and network?  Could your source and/or destination drive be going to sleep and/or in power saving mode at anytime during the backup process in the late evening where no physical access to the systems is occurring?  Did you upgrade the OS since having 2015 installed which could lead to power changes or other changes in Windows (like with Windows homegroup sharing which is vastly different in Windows 10 than with previous versions of Windows)?  What do your Windows system event logs show - any errors or warnings aroudn the time when the backups are failing.  What do you Acronis backup logs show as well - perhaps they can shed some light on the issue as well. 

I get your frustration, but there are a lot of Windows and/or specific system configurations that can cause network delays, dropped packets and or network disconnects as well.  Some that come to mind...

1) Advanced power settings in control panel...  make sure there is no power saver on hard drives, NIC's, or PCIE devices

2) Computer management >>> hardware management.  Also make sure there are no power saver features enabled on hard drives, NIC's or PCIE devices

3) Your NAS - make sure there are no power saving features enabled on this device either.

4) Have you run any hard drive diagnostics on both the source and destination drives?  Bad sectors on drives can cause the backup to fail if the disk content can't be read or written to.  Many people thing there drives are find, but after running chkdsk /f /r on the drive, they find there are bad sectors.  I also recommend using a third party hard drive tool like the free versions of WD Data lifeguard and/or Hard disk sentinel to see what the life of the drive(s) show and or if there are problems detected.

5) How often do you reboot your home router and/or NAS device?  Many older routers have limited CPU and onboard memory.  Having a constant network connection with large file transfers can eat up the resources and cause the device to become unresponsive for small periods of times.  There are many forum posts online about different routers needing to be rebooted periodically because they become unresonsive or slow over time (sometimes within hours, days, weeks or months).  Likewise, consumer home NAS devices can also be impacted by this to an extent.  I recently obtained a WD MyCloud 4TB for testing and have had very hit or miss responsiveness with this particular NAS when there are multiple connections to it at the same time.  Even just using Windows file explorer for the open shares, it sometimes takes a good 30 seconds to connect to the share when the device is being accessed by home devices for PLEX media sharing and a backup is running at the same time.

I don't want to say that Acronis isn't at fault - it may very well be.  However, unless you've tested and verified this to the letter, there's no more way to say that Acronis 2016 is the culprit, than Windows OS, network latency, AV running against files being created during backup, hardware power settings, etc.  There are a lot of possibilities here and identifying the exact root cause is not any easy task.  I have been using 2016 for the better part of a year, running backups to my home SMB share (a USB attachd hard drive connected directly to my ASUS AC-1900 router) with no backup issues.  However, I have adjusted all power settings to never let any of my hardware sleep or enter power saving either.  I also started with a fresh/clean install of Windows 10 and  fresh/clean install of Acronis 2016 when I installed Windows 10 so I don't have any carry over of past system configurations (or troubles) in my primary computer setup either.  I have since obtained a WD MyCloud 4TB NAS and ams also running daily backups to it as well and also don't have an issue with backups to it either (restores are a different issue across the network with this particular device, but I'm still working on that).

As far as contacting the CEO - we don't have the address either - Google would be you best bet.  I would imagine the CEO doesnt' accept direct emails from everyone either though.  Instead, you could reach out to General Manger, Gaidar and express your discourt.  Again though, unless there is definitive proof and troubleshooting in multiple areas to validate your assumption that 2016 is the culprit for this behavior in your unique environment, we can all only really speculate as to what might be the real problem.  

Unfortunately, troubleshooting can be a long and tedious process.  If it we're me though, and I was inclined to really get to the root of the problem,  I would start my test by building a fresh Windows 10 system with all current updates and patches and NO other software.  I would then only install Acronis 2016 from scratch, create my backups and run them in the same manner as you are now.  If it works, well, then you can assume that something in your current OS configuration (the OS you are currently running Acronis on) is the problem.  If it doesn't, then I would next modify my backups to run while the system is actively in use and not able to go into a power saving mode of any kind - these things are even harder to trouble shoot when no one is at the computer or there is no interation being sent to the computer, allowing it to start shutting off resourches at set times.  If a backup can run while the system is actively being used but not after hurs, I would look a little more at the power settings in control panel and device manager.  I would also consider resource availability of your router and NAS and run some network diagnostics with a large file transfer to the NAS using lanspeedtestlight (free) to get an idea of file transfer time and network speeds.  I would also run a constant ping (ping -t) during both the Acronis backup tests and the lanspeed tests to see if there is latency or dropped packets occurring.  

I'm an IT guy so doing this type of stuff doesn't bother me.  As a home user, I understaned that people just expect software like Acronis to work.  I do too.  However, it will only work as good as the software configruation and hardware it has to use.  Computers are great and can seemingly function fine, but have major issues under the hood that go unnoticed until those resources are called upon with a product like Acronis that has a deep intergration with the Operating System.  

I do hope that you find a solution without too much effort, but I believe more effort will be required to truly identify the issue in your unique situation.

Bobbo's comments are spot on, total system configuration including the network a system is attached to is essential to good and proper performance.  We usually find that users issues with network backups failing is a result of network or other hardware issues rather than the True Image product. 
 

Some users believe that just buying a gigabit modem or router and adding that into a home network will yield gigabit speeds when the reality is that it is almost impossible to obtain gigabit speed due to the hardware involved in the network as Bobbo mentioned CPU and hard disk latency, with disk latency being number one in slow response times.

The network equipment itself must be top shelf as well or performance will not be as expected.  I can personally attest to great performance from True Image in backup and recovery using True Image on my network however that is primarily due to the equipment I use and the hours spent in configuration of the network itself.  As an example it is possible for me to perform a 100GB+ backup over my gigabit network in under 5 minutes and a restore of that same data takes about 11 minutes to complete using traditional spinner hard disks.  It is also possible to cut those times in half when using SSD drives.  And for a real speed treat if I use the newer PCIe based SSD's backup and restore is rediculously fast. 

Having tested these various scenarios of hardware configurations out I conclude that the True Image product is not an issue in backup/restore performance, it is the rest of the hardware involved that causes such issues to arise and be a factor in the performance of the product.

Thank you Enchantec for all your efforts for all of us. I am astonished at your time taken for a 100GB image, especially over a network. I image from an SSD to an internal HDD and 100GB takes between 20-30 minutes, please divulge your secret.

My secret is really no secret at all.  As I said before it's all about the hardware.  I run a small yet rather complex home network.  The backbones are an ASUS RT-AC3200 Multi-Channel gigabit Wireless router coupled to an eight port gigabit unmanaged switch which provides connections to 3 wired connections, 2 desktops and a custom built NAS server running the Linux based FreeNAS OS system.  The NAS itself runs an I5 CPU, 16GB of 1600 DDR3 RAM, and a 12TB HDD drive pool consisting of 4, 3TB WD Red NAS drives.  

All of my equipment is Jumbo Frame capable and has Jumbo Frames enabled.  The combination allows for me to push 760mbps+ over the Cat 5e wired system.  FreeNAS uses what is known as a ZFS filesystem which basically allows for a redundant raid array to be built using all attached disks if desired.  So in my case there are 4 7200 RPM 64MB Cache drives writing data during a backup. 

If I run a backup from one desktop to a second desktop all wired of course and from an SSD on one to an SSD on the other backup times for a normal 45GB Windows 10 Pro install will complete in around 4 minutes and 45 seconds.  I have also tested backup from a Samsung 256GB PCIe M.2 SSD on one machine to a 500GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD on another machine same 45GB data size and the backup will complete in about 2 minutes and 35 seconds.  At that rate I have fully saturated the wired connections at 1Gbps.  The later illustrates the reduced latency of the solid state drive over that of a spinning hard disk.

Phew! I had to have a lie down after trying to absorb all that technical stuff, you must have worked for Cray? I shall settle for my 20-30 minutes.

Haha, I hear that!  My scenarios are not typical of most users of True Image true.  In general, a typical consumer grade small wired network should be able to achieve a data transfer rate of between 60MBps to 80MBps.  Using those figures should help in deciding if there might be a problem with your setup or not.  In your case I think given what you report that you are in that average sweet spot of performance. 

To close this discussion, I uninstalled Acronis 2016, downloaded and installed Acronis 2015 and was able to complete all backups WITHOUT ERRORS.  No network time outs, no perpetual Calculating Space Required messages, just the solid performance we have come to expect from this Enterprise level backup software.