Acronis True Image 2016 Extremely Slow On Brand New Desktop PC

So does this machine use the M.2 SSD as the boot device?  If yes what are the specs on that drive?  What driver are you using for that drive controller and what controller (make model) is that drive connected to?  Are your USB 3.0 controller drivers the most current available or have you checked?  This might sound dumb but have you traced the USB 3.0 connectors internally in the machine from the front panel to the motherboard to make sure they are attached to the right ports?  You would be surprised what can happen during assembly!  Have you checked all drives for errors using chkdsk?  With such large drives that process will take a long time but would be worth the effort, I myself just added a brand new USB 3.0 4TB external drive and found corruption on the disk. Took about 8 hours to scan and fix the drive but works fine now.

From my experience the big box vendors do not optimize their systems with up to date drivers so I would suspect that to be your bigest and most likely issue here.  Hopefully the above will give you some idea of where to start troubleshooting.   

Enchantech,

Thank you for your reply.  Yes, the M.2 SSD is the boot device.  All of the specs are shown in the original post as well as in my signature.  I went through Device Manager and checked all of the USB drivers and tried to update the drivers but every time it said they are the newest.  While the computer came pre-installed with Windows 10 Pro, it was also upgraded to the latest build via Windows Update shortly after I got the PC over a week ago.

I'm not sure what you mean by if the USB 3.0 connectors are connected to the right ports.  Anything that gets plugged into either of the USB 3.0 (Superspeed) ports gets recognized instantly.  I have checked all drives with chkdsk and no errors were reported.  I also checked the external drives with Seagate Dashboard / Seatools and the drives are fine.  Running chkdsk on all of my drives through an elevated command prompt took less than 1 minute.  Why did it take 8 hours on your computer?  Were you running chkdsk by itself before using the "old school" DOS /f switch/paramter?

The only warning I saw was when I tried the Acronis Rescue Media.  It said that the sector size of the C: (SSD boot drive) is too big.  However, I am able to create a backup successfully of everything except the 5 TB external hard drive in about 1 hour.  It is writing to the 8 TB external hard drive at about 150 GB per hour.  Once I add that 5 TB external hard drive into the mix, the backup becomes impossible to create.

One major difference between the XPS 8900 and the XPS 8500 is the BIOS.  By default, there is something called "secure boot" that I had to disable just to get the computer to boot from the Bluray/DVD drive instead of from the SSD.  I had to change to UEFI mode and then switch the boot up sequence and save settings and reboot.  When the computer loads and I enter the power-on password, I noticed the boot from the Acronis Rescue Media DVD-R is very slow.  It doesn't let me pick the 32-bit version of Acronis True Image.  When I load the 64-bit version of Acronis, I noticed that when I use the "Browse" buttons to drives it takes around 20 seconds just to find the drive letters.  This was not the case on the old XPS 8500 where the drive letters came up instantly.

It's disappointing that this a problem and it seems to be my only one with the computer.  However, it is such a major one because I need to perform backups at least once a week since I use it for both personal use and for my business.  Is there any type of system info file that I can generate and have someone look at?  It appears the forum is being overloaded by spam threads right now, so I'm not sure if that many people are going to be viewing valid threads from real Acronis customers right now.

Same thing.

Network (and local) backups  with ATI2016 about 3 times slow rather then ATI2015.

The backup performance of ATI 2016 is simply terrible. After numerous problems and issue with TI 2016 I moved to Macrium Reflect. Backup perfromance is ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE better. As an example, on my Dell XPS 15 9550 backing my primary drve which is an SSD about 125 GB my full backups went from over an hour (almost 2 actually) with TI to 30 - 40 minutes with Macrium. My incrementals went from 30 - 40 minutes to 1 - 2 minutes. Oh, and if you wantg to make any changed to your backup definitions you can, and it works just fine. No need to delet the entire backup definition and start from scratch every time like with TI...and fully viewable logs, easy to delete backups - without having to boot to recovery mode...etc, etc, etc...basically it actually works without having to make it a hobby to get it to work....

Jay wrote:

Enchantech,

Thank you for your reply.  Yes, the M.2 SSD is the boot device.  All of the specs are shown in the original post as well as in my signature.  I went through Device Manager and checked all of the USB drivers and tried to update the drivers but every time it said they are the newest.  While the computer came pre-installed with Windows 10 Pro, it was also upgraded to the latest build via Windows Update shortly after I got the PC over a week ago.

Using Windows Device Manager select your USB 3.0 controller(s) right click and choose Properties, select Driver and make note of the driver version number and manufacturer.  Next, visit the Dell Support site, search for your machine model and look for drivers and firmware.  Find the latest drivers for your USB controller(s) and verify if the driver version is the same as appears in Device Manager.  If not then your driver(s) are probably outdated.

I'm not sure what you mean by if the USB 3.0 connectors are connected to the right ports.  Anything that gets plugged into either of the USB 3.0 (Superspeed) ports gets recognized instantly.  I have checked all drives with chkdsk and no errors were reported.  I also checked the external drives with Seagate Dashboard / Seatools and the drives are fine.  Running chkdsk on all of my drives through an elevated command prompt took less than 1 minute.  Why did it take 8 hours on your computer?  Were you running chkdsk by itself before using the "old school" DOS /f switch/paramter?

The only way to know for sure if the ports are connected correctly is by visual inspection.  That means you will need to open your PC case and look inside.  You should be able to find on the Dell support site a schematic layout of the motherboard in your machine.  By looking at that you can locate where the USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports are located.  Visually trace the USB 3.0 case mounted port wires to the motherboard connectors making certain they are in fact attached to the 3.0 ports, not the 2.0 ports.  If you cannot locate a schematic layout these ports should display stenciled labels stating which they are.  Stenciling may be very smal print and might require a magnifying glass to be able to read them.

The only warning I saw was when I tried the Acronis Rescue Media.  It said that the sector size of the C: (SSD boot drive) is too big.  However, I am able to create a backup successfully of everything except the 5 TB external hard drive in about 1 hour.  It is writing to the 8 TB external hard drive at about 150 GB per hour.  Once I add that 5 TB external hard drive into the mix, the backup becomes impossible to create.

Your 5TB drive could have some form of corruption either file system or sector.  It would be a good idea to run chkdsk on that drive to check for errors.  You can do that using a command prompt.  You will need to run the command prompt as admin.  Once you have the command prompt open you will need to select your 5TB drive by typing CD *:\ where * is the drive letter of your 5TB drive.  Your command line should then display your 5TB drive letter for example H:\.  Once the command line displays your correct drive letter then type chkdsk.  Your disk will be scanned for errors and any found will show as a result once the scan is complete.

One major difference between the XPS 8900 and the XPS 8500 is the BIOS.  By default, there is something called "secure boot" that I had to disable just to get the computer to boot from the Bluray/DVD drive instead of from the SSD.  I had to change to UEFI mode and then switch the boot up sequence and save settings and reboot.  When the computer loads and I enter the power-on password, I noticed the boot from the Acronis Rescue Media DVD-R is very slow.  It doesn't let me pick the 32-bit version of Acronis True Image.  When I load the 64-bit version of Acronis, I noticed that when I use the "Browse" buttons to drives it takes around 20 seconds just to find the drive letters.  This was not the case on the old XPS 8500 where the drive letters came up instantly.

When you say that you had to change your bios to UEFI mode, what was the setting before you changed it?  TI 2016 Recovery media is now setup to run under UEFI boot 64 bit mode thus explaining part of your question.  Disabling Secure Boot is necessary to gain access to the disk drives without running afoul of the the UEFI security settings.  The delay in the display of drive letters is due in part to UEFI security as well.

It's disappointing that this a problem and it seems to be my only one with the computer.  However, it is such a major one because I need to perform backups at least once a week since I use it for both personal use and for my business.  Is there any type of system info file that I can generate and have someone look at?  It appears the forum is being overloaded by spam threads right now, so I'm not sure if that many people are going to be viewing valid threads from real Acronis customers right now.

It is possible to generate a system report for such purposes.  You should see that option during the boot up sequence of the Recovery Media.  Choose it and save the result to a location on your system that you can easily locate.  It can then be added here as a file attachment or uploaded to support.

I would add here that you should also check your storage controller driver file version and post that back here.  You should also verify on the Dell support site that yours is the latest available.

I am still having problems with Acronis True Image 2016 Build 6027 and here is an update as to what is going on.

I ran software from Dell called Dell System Detect to analyze errors on my system.  The only issue that was found was that the front USB 3.0 ports were performing at a USB 2.0 level.  I purchased two brand new 6 foot USB 3.0 USB cables and connected the 5 TB external hard drive and the 8 TB external hard drive to the USB 3.0 ports on the back of the computer.  Both drives are also getting power from their respective power ports.

After running Dell System Detect again, it showed that the ports and drives were performing at a good level.  I manually checked the speeds myself.  It looks like I get around 30 MB/s on average when I do file transfers using the front USB 3.0 ports.  However, when I use the rear USB 3.0 ports, I get a range from anywhere from a few MB/s up to 175 MB/s.  It looks like when large files are being transferred, that is when the MB/s is high but when a lot of smaller files are being transferred, the speed suffers.

I rechecked both drives with Seagate Dashboard and found no errors.  On the 8 TB drive, chkdsk said "The Volume Bitmap is incorrect" and it repaired the problem.  The chkdsk utility found no errors with the 5 TB drive.  I found no errors by using the Windows 10 graphical interface to check for disk errors.  I don't think Seatools is compatible with Windows 10 because it just reboots the computer when I try and run it.

It appears that I have all of the latest USB drivers.  It turns out it was always on UEFI, just disabling the secure boot mode allows me to choose a "Legacy Boot" option instead of UEFI, which I did not do.  I managed to generate the system report ZIP file using Acronis System Report.  Acronis System Report would only work properly in Windows.  I am not sure if it is safe to post the ZIP file here or I have to send it to Acronis.  10.0.10586.0 is the version of USB Attached SCSI (UAS) Mass Storage Device which was listed under Device Manager's Storage Controllers section.

I removed quite a lot of files from the 5 TB drive, so it only has 3.5 TB used on it.  I defragged all of my drives.  Diskeeper 15 was not able to do this for some reason, so I had to use another software called PerfectDisk.  There was no fragmentation found on the external hard drives, only the internal ones.

Yesterday, I tried a backup of everything to the 8 TB external hard drive using the Acronis Rescue Media version of Acronis True Image 2016.  There were 9 total steps.  The estimated time varied from 2 hours to 2 days.  After 12 hours, it managed to reach step 2 of 9 and it looked like it would complete.  However, after another 5 hours, it just remained at step 2 of 9 and the green progress bar didn't move any further within that period of time.  I had to cancel the backup and power down the computer.

I no longer know what to do at this point.  It doesn't seem like I'm going to be able to create a backup with Acronis True Image 2016.  Any other ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Given your last post it would appear that you have remedied a few issues you had with your PC.  That's good. 

Can you explain what you mean in your post covering your last backup attempt when you say "There were 9 total steps"?  Can you further explain what step 2 is where the hang occurs?  How much total data is on the 8TB drive that you are backing up?  Is the drive partitioned?  If yes, how many partitions are there?

You are wise to have connected the drives to the back panel of your machine, those should always perform better than case mounted ports.  As info small file sizes always transfer at a slower rate than large ones. 

The USB storage drivers you list are the default Windows drivers for your USB controller and may not be optimized for your hardware.  You should have a look at the Dell support site for your machine and see if there are any alternatives for your machine.  If there are you should download and isntall them.  If you do not find any drivers for USB 3.0 on the Dell site your machine should have come with a utility CD.  Have a look there for USB drivers.  If you find them, install them.  This should have been done by Dell during the manufacturing process but may have not.  Your reference to your front panel USB ports only operating at 2.0 speeds points to this being possible.  Especially if those ports are 3.0 ports which I suspect they are!

Enchantech wrote:

Given your last post it would appear that you have remedied a few issues you had with your PC.  That's good. 

Can you explain what you mean in your post covering your last backup attempt when you say "There were 9 total steps"?  Can you further explain what step 2 is where the hang occurs?  How much total data is on the 8TB drive that you are backing up?  Is the drive partitioned?  If yes, how many partitions are there?

You are wise to have connected the drives to the back panel of your machine, those should always perform better than case mounted ports.  As info small file sizes always transfer at a slower rate than large ones. 

The USB storage drivers you list are the default Windows drivers for your USB controller and may not be optimized for your hardware.  You should have a look at the Dell support site for your machine and see if there are any alternatives for your machine.  If there are you should download and isntall them.  If you do not find any drivers for USB 3.0 on the Dell site your machine should have come with a utility CD.  Have a look there for USB drivers.  If you find them, install them.  This should have been done by Dell during the manufacturing process but may have not.  Your reference to your front panel USB ports only operating at 2.0 speeds points to this being possible.  Especially if those ports are 3.0 ports which I suspect they are!

 

Thank you for your continued help Enchantech.  Each step is equal to 1 partition.  When it was at step 2, I assume it was working on my 5 TB drive since that has by far the most data on it.  The 8 TB drive only has a few files on it put on there from Seagate.  It has approximately a 7.25 TB capacity out of the box and is partitioned as NTFS.  One thng I found odd is that it says my 5 TB drive is an active partition, although there are markers saying the C: is the boot partition.

The front two ports are USB 3.0.  There are no drivers for USB 3.0 on the Dell support site and that is where Dell stores everything nowadays.  Dell no longer ships computers with driver/utility CDs/DVDs anymore.  It is a cost-cutting measure for sure, but pretty silly because what would you do if you couldn't connect to the internet to download anything?  You'd have to bother a friend, family member or go to a library I guess.

So, I decided to experiment with Macrium Reflect again.  On my old Dell XPS 8500, it said it would take days to backup.  In fact, any backup solution besides Acronis True Image would say roughly the same thing on that computer.  However, this time when I used a trial version of Macrium Reflect on the Dell XPS 8900 Special Edition, I managed to create a full synthetic backup with daily incremental backups in roughly 14 hours.  It ran from 1.1 Gb/s to 1.6 Gb/s on all of my drives except for the external hard drive where it ran between 500 Gb/s and 600 Gb/s.  Now, that's not exactly super fast but for now it did the job that Acronis True Image was not able to do this time around.  The daily incremental backups take only 10 - 15 minutes to create.

So for now, I will have to use Macrium Reflect unless there is a better solution.  I hope that Acronis True Image moves back into the top spot soon.  If I ever get Google Fiber in my area, I'm sure the unlimited online backup would work too.  Overall, I have a feeling that severe scope creep is the problem.  But seriously, you could not pay me enough money to look at that code and try to debug it!

After 2 months of using Macrium Reflect, my experiences have been just average so far.  Are there any upcoming improvements to Acronis True Image 2016 or do you think we will have to wait until Acronis True Image 2017 is released?  Also, when do you think Acronis True Image 2017 will be released?

Jay, networking out of the picture, I have recently been doing various online and offline backups with Macrium Reflect Free and ATIH 2016 onine, offline linux and offline WinPE.

Using two different systems (ASUS T200 tablet 2-in-1 and my home built PC), I've found that performance in the Windows version of ATIH and Macrium Free are pretty close.  In all of my tests, Acronis usually eeks out faster speeds than Macrium (again, no networking involved - it's all local connections with USB 3 and/or SATA on the mobo).  Compression is also usually very close with the output files, but Acronis usually is a little better too.  Honestly though, there isn't a lot of difference in the end results though - not quite a tie, but very close.

Now, using the WinPE with both applications has shown some different results.  On my main pc, Acronis WinPE still comes out on top (just slightly) in both speed and compression over Macrium, but it's still pretty close. I use the same Samsung EVO 840 250GB and UsB 3.0 adapter on USB 3.0 ports and quickformat the drive between each test as well.  On my ASUS T200 though, Macrium is way behind - nearly 3 times as long to complete, but still the same size output file.  It looks like even though it is using the Win10 ADK, it still defaults to USB 2.0 speeds, but only happens on this system for me. 

Acronis Linux bootable media works fine on my ASUS T200 and speeds are comparable to that of the ATIH winpe.  However, on my main PC, it has the same problem as Macrium did on the ASUS T200 where it defaults to USB 2.0 speeds. 

Long story short, it seems to vary from system to system.  I can also say that on my custom PC, the embedded USB 3.0 ports are actually slower than the front panel ones that are connected on the USB 3.0 external header (different controllers).  With my front ports, I average about 400Mb/s read and write on ny 840 evo with the external UsB 3.0 cable, but on the back ports it's only about 300MB read and 250MB write (Acronis aside - general file copy tests and crystaldisk benchmark tests).

As for upgrades coming, can't say for sure.  Even in the MVP program, we're not privileged to the release dates and any background info about product development is something we cannot discuss in the forum.  Past builds have show 2-3 version changes per release so I would expect to see at least one more this year though.  Generally, it looks like new releases come out around the 3rd quarter (August/September/October) time frame. 

I also wanted to add that despite drives having USB 3.0 connectivity, the internal drive performance will make a huge difference.  Some of the larger 8TB drives are actually multiple drives in RAID - a lot of these are slower 5400 RPM drives as well so that's where the bottleneck can be occuring.  Your Seagate seems to show that it has 150MB/s speeds, but as you've probably found manufacturers list the best performance possible and realworld use is usually less than that - especially when dealing with anything less than large file writes (4K small writes are usually much much much slower).  The other thing about the 8TB drive is that it uses Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) to squeeze more data onto the drives, but can result in slower performance in many cases. Larger drives like the 8TB are usually not fast "write" performers and are more ideal for reads after the data has  been copied there (say for movies, pictures, etc that will generally not be getting written to over and over, but accessed as READ from other devices for media consumption).

http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/shingled-magnetic-recoding-smr-101-ba…

Drive-Managed (Autonomous) SMR

Drive-managed SMR provides the easiest deployment path simply because the drive is backwards compatible with all existing hardware, applications, filesystems and operating systems. The HDD exposes itself to the host system as a standard HDD, and the host has no knowledge that the underlying media employs SMR technology. Drive-managed SMR leans heavily upon the technologies pioneered with SSD garbage collection and translation layers, and it also features overprovisioning areas to assist in drive management operations.

The drive handles all data requests internally, which creates unpredictable performance degradation under some conditions. This is a negative aspect, but the cost of this type of implementation is a crucial component. Many customers will tolerate the slow and unpredictable performance in exchange for the incredible economics, and thus we have already seen this method penetrate the client space as well.

Host-Managed (Restrictive) SMR

Host-Managed SMR is not backwards compatible with existing host systems and requires changes to hardware, filesystems, applications and operating systems. This technique provides the host system with knowledge of the underlying media and employs new commands that are under development by the T10/T13 standards committees. SCSI and SATA use ZBC (Zoned Block Commands) and ZAC (Zoned ATA Commands), respectively, to steer data directly to the various zones on an SMR HDD. The drive will reject the request if the host does not send SMR-tuned requests. New SAS and SATA HBAs are working their way to market that support ZBC and ZAC commands. 

If you had an opportunity to test creating a backup image to another disk - say an SSD (i know you wouldn't fit everythign on it, but just to compare the speed differences in your current setup using the online versions of both ATIH and Macrium, as well as the PE versions of both, and the Linux bootable media of Acronis, you'd probably find much better transfer speeds and narrow down which one provides the best performance for your setup. At that point, it would be a matter of finding a faster medium to use for all of your backup images.  Short of a local raid device (not a NAS using networking), I don't think you're going to find performance in the larger single drives at this point in time when it comes to write speed. 

Bobbo,

Thank you for your quick and detailed reply.  SMR is probably the issue.  I have found that my 8 TB external hard drive is now at the point where it has a very short life span left even though it is only 3 months old.  There are times when it will not boot up and the external LEDs will flash etc.  I have purchased a brand new 5 TB external hard drive that is the same kind as my 5 TB external hard drive that has been working successfully for over 2 years now.  I am going to clean up a lot of the unnecessary files on the original 5 TB external drive and then try backups with both ATI 2016 and Macrium Reflect and see what happens.  I will post my results here in no more than a week.  Thanks again for your help.

Running like ice uphill in the dead of winter is one of Acronis 2016 "features".  It is basically a peice of software to be avoided at all costs.

Backup of 45 GB folder takes my 8-core system, over 18 hours. 

A full system drive backup takes longer than the scheduled time between full/incremental backup (one week).\

Every time Windows 10 pushes an update onto my workstation, TI 2016 stops working (last error "can't create database") and I have to uninstall / reinstall. (Repair says it succeedes but does not fix anything.)

Every power-down gets the "wait for 2 minuts while Acronis completes operations..." but it actually takes 7 -10 minutes.  I DO NOT have continuous backup enabled.

There is now way to save backup settings so every time I have to reinstall (nearly a dozen times in the past 8 weeks) I have to completely re-do backup settings from scratch.

I will be switching to another, faster, better behaved backup / restore package shortly.  I believe that is the only fix for Acronis problems - i.e. they need to go out of business.

wmc wrote:

Running like ice uphill in the dead of winter is one of Acronis 2016 "features".  It is basically a peice of software to be avoided at all costs.

Backup of 45 GB folder takes my 8-core system, over 18 hours. 

A full system drive backup takes longer than the scheduled time between full/incremental backup (one week).\

Every time Windows 10 pushes an update onto my workstation, TI 2016 stops working (last error "can't create database") and I have to uninstall / reinstall. (Repair says it succeedes but does not fix anything.)

Every power-down gets the "wait for 2 minuts while Acronis completes operations..." but it actually takes 7 -10 minutes.  I DO NOT have continuous backup enabled.

There is now way to save backup settings so every time I have to reinstall (nearly a dozen times in the past 8 weeks) I have to completely re-do backup settings from scratch.

I will be switching to another, faster, better behaved backup / restore package shortly.  I believe that is the only fix for Acronis problems - i.e. they need to go out of business.

You clearly have issues with your rig and/or your ATIH install.  My $400 Asus T200 with a baytrail process can knock out a 22GB full disk image to a USB 3.0 attached SSD in less than 4 minutes with high compression and encryption.  8-cores will make no difference for your backup if you have bottlenecks with write speeds based on low-end hard drives and/or with slow networking... you do not mention how or where your backups are being written so it's hard to say.  The fact that you also continually receive the 2 minute shutdown message is further proof that your install of ATIH is not in good shape either as that is not normal and a good cleanup and reinstall of the application should clear that up - you say you have cleaned the application and reinstalled several times, but I am guessing you have not done a complete and full removal and install and probably continue to carry over whatever the initial cause was as a result.  The same goes for backup settings not being saved - if your install was not corrupt, that would not be an issue either.  If you follow the steps for removal and install here, I would be curious to know how things behave after that as far as the shutdowns and settings issue are concerned.  I doubt you willl see any performance increase though if you are writing images across a slow network link, to slow 5400RPM drives, and/or an underpowered NAS-like device.  Give this a try and report back honestly on the application issues afterwards and we can try to help narrow down your performance issues after that.  

https://forum.acronis.com/forum/113656#comment-334624

I have 3 personal systems with different hardware all running fine and I use ATIH on several other systems in other environments as well.  I'm not sure of your level of IT knowledge and/or know-how, but I would be willing to bet that the issues you are experincing are due to a poor setup related to OS settings/configurations (do you use registry mechanics and OS tweakers regularly), slow storage drives and/or slow network tranfers, upgrades from a previous OS and/or upgrades from Acronis without clean installs.  

I'm pretty sure Acronis will be around for quite some time, despite your desire to see them go.  I wish you the best of luck with whatever backup application you end up using, but if your general rig setup issues are not resolved, you're probably not going to see a whole lot better results. 

The typcial "fan-boy" reply that I get even from Acronis.  Yet, there are no errors in error logs, no other applications have such difficulties, (including earlier versions of Acronis), and I can do a simple file copy of the same directory to the same destination in a MUCH shorter (i.e. reasonable) amount of time.  Should there be overhead for incremental / differential processing - of course - but DAYS AND DAYS worth of extra overhead?  I think not.

Clearly the problem is with Acronis.  

It is not for the user to configure their operating system and application / file configuration and usage to suite Actonis.  It is SUPPOSED TO BE THE OTHER WAY AROUND!  Acronis is supposed to be MADE COMPATIBLE (AND FUNCTIONAL AS ADVERTISED) IN THE USERS' WINDOWS 10 ENVIRONMENTS.  What is the point of backing up a system I have to compromise, that I have to remove all applications from, downgrade to some single processor / 32-bit OS or whatever to get the backup software to work?  What about my normal use?  Why should I have to give all that up, and all I produce from it (which is mich of what I want to protect with backups in the first place) just to get the damn backup software to work?

This is NOT A REASONABLE POSITION ON YOUR PART OR THE PART OF ACRONIS.  This software is truly so limited in its ability, appears to only work properly on a very number of simple, specifically configured systems, that it should be withdrawn from sales.

 By NO stretch of the imagination is THIS "normal": (see attached screenshot).

No it's not normal, not by a long shot and that's my point above.  

Unfortunately, you've provided no proof that your slow backup is a result of ATIH.  You have not even mentioned the types of drives you're backing up to, whether they are network shares or phsyical connections etc.  I can show you proof of ATIH backup speed on multiple systems with various hardware with offline Linux recovery, WinPE reocvery and Windows online ATIH.  Will it work on every system no - especially not one that is not configured correctly or has other background issues we couldn't possibly know about your unique hardware and software setup.  

You have offered nothing back in return but criticism towards Acronis and those who are attempting to help find a resolution.  Have you even tried to run an offline recovery backup to the same storage device to compare speeds to what you're seeing in Windows?  

I am using an HP Netbook, an ASUS T200 2-in-1, a custom desktop build, several Dell's and Surface Pro devices and have no issues with speed or compression on my network or other environments with ATIH 2016.  Granted, there are occassional bugs with the datbases from time to time that have been brought in the forum with work-a-rounds that resolve those, plus the feature changes we are all hoping to have returned in the future.  Acronis is not a perfect application, but that is besides the point.  For general backup and recovery, it has always been rock solid for me.  All 3 of my personal systems are running Win 10 x64 v1511 as well.  

I am not convinced the problem is with Acronis, and unless you can provide more details about your setup, I think you will find little assistance here in the forum. 

It is likely I've been at this computer thing longer than you've been alive. (Remember programming by punching holes in paper tape with a stylus and hoping to God the paper tape reader wouldn't chew up the tape? Or setting banks of switches, pressing an "enter button", setting the switches for the next word of input, the reading the lights when the program halted because you mis-entered a word you had input an hour earlier, and now had to start over from scratch?  Remember the elation when that wonderful invention  came from IBM - punch cards and keyboard driven card puncher and card readers? From studying, getting degrees in, and working in computer and software driven fields until my retirement, I think I at least learned enough to tell when a single application is not right, as opposed to when an entire OS / system is "misconfigured"

In this case, it is only Acronis that one day decides not to open the UI when requested (yet still  has sometimes 4, sometimes 6 processes still running). It is only Acronis that another day puts up "can't create data base..." alert when opening the UI is requested.  It is only Acronis that another day you discover has just stopped doing scheduled backups, yet messages saying you have to wait for shutdown while Acronis finishes its current task. It is only Acronis that finds a new and different way to stop working after every Windows 10 update push from Microsoft.  It is only Acronis that sometimes decides to "forget" the backups listed on its "home pane", and if you try to use it to open a .tib tells you the filetype is unrecognised.  It is only Acronis that has to be uninstalled and re-installed to solve (albeit only temporarily) each one of these and other problems.  It is only Acronis which alll of a sudden decides to slow itself to a crawl taking anywhere from 20 hours to two days to backup 45 GB.  (Again, manual copy of the same files to the same destination using Windows Explorer takes only slightly longer than the minimum time you would calcute for such a transfre based the USB 2 link / destination drive throughput.)  And each time Acronis fails, there is nary a footprint left anywhere - search any event / error log you can think of.

All this happens when any diagnositc I run, from SFC, DISM, dx diag, SeaTools disk diags, HP hardware diags etc. find no problem with OS or computer.  And neither do any of the many applications (way more complex and) other than Acronis. 

So, after a decade with Acronis, I am DONE!  I have new backup software I'm testing, looks good so far, so when I'm satisfied it is going to do what I need it to do without all the shenangins Acronis is now becoming famous for, my system will be cleansed of all traces of Acronis.

But if you want to go searching for the "its the USER'S fault" item in my config - have at it: (Attached)

Oh, BTW this is just one of 3 machines experiencing these and other variations of non-functionality that keep requiring Acronis uninstall / re-install, all running Windows 10 (both of the others are newer-generation lap-tops compared to this workstation).

I am done with Acronis - that's it.  Just wanted to warn others.

WMC - if you're done with ATIH, I have no issue with that and I wish you the best of luck.  I've reviewed your specs and they are pretty decent, but they don't provide any actual logs about the system or what's going on.  If you want to send me your Windows system and application logs I can take a look at those as well.

I’m not saying Acronis doesn’t have faults.  I've experienced a corrupted database in ATIH as well, but I also have had the same experience with Retrospect, Crashplan, Macrium, Ghost and even Windows native backup.  It's going to happen at some point or another and if you actually followed the cleanup guide.  After you get your hardware sorted out (read below), I’d recommend the cleanup/reinstall and start a new backup task and see how it performs then.  I’m pretty sure if you replace your failing external hard drive with something better, you’d see a big difference in performance, but I'm pretty confident that repairing your Acronis install would also be beneficial in your case.  If you don't want to, that's up to you though.

I did look up your system and it was purchased July 28, 2009 and your 3 year warranty support ended July 27, 2012.  This model originally launched with XP, then Vista, then 7 and did get some minor 8.1 support as of mid-2013, but HP hasn’t' released anything since then and most drivers are before that.  They don't officially support Windows 10 on it, although it "should" work as Windows 10 does have pretty good driver compatibility.  Your bios is currently at version 3.54 which is not even the latest - 3.57 was last released September 2013.  What improvements it may provide, I'm not sure, but worth a shot upgrading it as it may provide some controller stability. 

That said, your hardware is reaching 7 years of life.  How stable the capacitors on your motherboard and other hardware in your system really are, is purely a guess.  It may seem fine (it may actually be fine), but the hardware is beginning to get long in the tooth.  That may have nothing to do with your issues, but it might, so I wanted to point these items out.

*** And now, for the best part…  ***

You have 3 drives, but I can’t actually tell if both of the 1.82TB drives are in a RAID 1 configuration or not.  If they are in RAID, I find it odd that the first shows 3 partitions with C: and F:, and the other one has an E: drive (which makes me think they are not in RAID since they are not the same partition scheme):

1 x ST2000DX001-1CM164 2TB (internal) is a hybrid drive.  I cannot say how old this drive is from the information in the file you provided.  However, I can say from my own experience with SSHD’s this could be part of your problem. SSHD’s are only beneficial in speed performance for recurring file access sequences like startup/shutdown.  They often underperform in data read/writes in daily use (when compared to other non SSHD spinning drives) because the very limited cache memory quickly fills up and once that happens, the drive becomes slower than a spinning drive of the same type since it continues to try and use the cache first, but can't free it up quickly enough. I can imagine this is happening quite a bit during large backup tasks.  There are several forums and reviews on SSHD performance for real world use:

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-1730436/sshd-hdd.html

https://www.reddit.com/r/applehelp/comments/36r3sz/seagate_sshd_1tb_way_slower_than_older_sshd_750gb/

****** 1 x Seagate Backup+ Desk USB Device 4TB - NA5JVJQK appears to be your Acronis backup destination drive.  It is reporting the following error:

Storage Access Alignment: Incorrect function

This advises that your 4TB external drive has a physical misalignment of the platters or magnetic head which is most likely the real cause of your slow backup/performance issue. Whether or not other tools are showing issues with your disk, it is surely an issue and only a matter of time before it fails. As this is a portable drive, it may very well have been transported, dropped, etc, or it may just be failing – I could not look up this particular device to determine how old it is though - it may be a new disk, but it is physically damaged. We also have no real way of confirming what kind of “normal” read/write speeds you see on this drive as it is also connected via USB .  If you were to Robocopy a test folder like "C:\Windows\System32" to your external hard drive and monitor it with Windows 10’s task manager’s performance tab, it might show a bit more detail about how well the drive fairs with constant read/writes to the drive. You can also do this why Acronis is backing up and see what read/write performance looks like – which has nothing to do with Acronis itself (OK, maybe a little, but really, it boils down to your drives performance and not the ATIH application).

From the issues you have mentioned above, there is no doubt that your Acronis database is corrupt.  What caused that for sure, I cannot say, but I expect that it could be due to a physically defective/failing external hard drive and/or slow caching for the main OS hybrid drive... probably a combination of the two.

Perhaps I could take take this discussion in a different direction — more focused on network backups.

First, I have used Acronis products for many years and like them very much. But I also like having backups that finish in a reasonable amount of time. By all measures we have an up-to-date and reasonably fast residential LAN. Yet even if I connect my laptop directly into the router by ethernet and use a backup configuration with no compression, I get pitifully slow network backup speeds from ATI 2016. I have been watching this problem for some time and it is quite consistent. Backup to a USB 3.0 external hard drive is reasonably fast, though slower than I would expect.

Backup over my LAN, however, is intolerably slow, even with the most milk-toast settings in the ATI configuration. As an example, with no compression, ATI 2016 Service on my laptop is showing occasional bursts of 64 or 32 Mbps activity in Task Manager (Windows 10 Pro) and over a path that has 1 Gbps hardware throughout. This translates into over 24 hours to transfer about 750 GB — totally unacceptable.

So, I’m hoping someone can help me with this problem, otherwise I have to look at other alternatives. That makes me quite an unhappy camper at the moment. So, if anyone has any useful suggestions, please help.

PS--lanspeedtest shows 660 Mbps over the same LAN path--obviously very much faster than what I'm getting with ATI 2016!

Hi Jerald, 

It's going to be difficult to find you a direct answer as we have no insight into your network settings, router configurations, OS drivers, cabling, etc.  Not even sure if you'r backing up to a NAS another Windows system share and what hardware is being used.

Are you seeing this slow backup from within Windows and with the offline recovery media? Perhaps try both and see if the results are the same.  If you want another comparison, I would do a Windows system image to the same share and see how long it takes. Lanspeed test is great - I use it too.  However, you may be seeing slowdown from your router overtime if the CPU or memory is maxing out at some point.  On your Lanspeed test, set the file size to the size of your backup and let it run and see how log it takes and what the final result is.  Even then you're comparing apples to oranges as Acronis is reading and copying actual data that is of fixed sizes and spread across your disk, where Lanspeed test generates "fake data" on the fly and does not have to read and then write data that is of varying sizes and locations throughout the OS and drive in general. 

Perhaps the issue is you're using the default backup size and creating a single large file over the network and that is taxing your memory.  You could try setting the default .tib size to something more manageable like 10Gb chunks and see if that helps at all.  Also, why did you remove the default compression?  Compression will actually speed up network transfer rates.  

Take the "calculating backup time" with a huge grain of salt - it is far from accurate and may start off with several hours, drop down to a couple, move up and down and ultimately reesult in a much faster backup.  It takes me roughly 7 minutes to backup 55Gb from a Samsung 950 Pro NVME drive across my 1Gbs LAN to a WD MyCloud 4tb drive so that would equate to about 100 minutes to complete 750Gb/s if transfer rate held up over time.  I get pretty consistent full backups from within Windows and with the recovery media.

At work, even though we're using enterprise switches, I see lower transfer rates - roughly 45-70Mb/s transfers with Acronis backups, but it's not the network.  The bottleneck is the old MD1000 which has a data transfer limitation on the drives when more than 10 are RAIDED together with the particular SAS controller.  There are a lot of factors that can be slowing things down.  Start with something easy as a Windows system image and use it for comparison.

Jerald,

Bobbo offers sound advice with network data transfer speeds.  Throughput is highly dependent on the hardware involved.  More often than not the limiting factor is the device used as a destination for your backup.  The limiting factors are harddisk latency, available free memory, and CPU if involved.  Note also that transfer speed will start out high and then drop as the transfer continues over time. 

I was also experiencing rather poor performance using the most recent version of ATI (performance issues was not the main reason I switched but rather significant lack of feature/function). I changed nothing else except to switch from ATI to Macrium Reflect and I saw literally an order of magnitude improvement in performance of my backup tasks. Others have reported testing performance between the two (ATI and MR) and not seeing similar improvements and YMMV, but I can only report on what I experienced.

Thanks to Bobo and Enchantechfor their thoughtful and helpful replies. After moving the ethernet connection from my main work machine from my ATA device to a gigabit switch my full backup times have moved into a timeframe (about nine hours) so I am happy, at least for now.

Jerald,

Thanks for the positive feedback and solution in your case.  We're you backing up via a 10/100 switch or wireless prior to this?  

Jerald,

Thanks for posting back, glad to hear that you have solved the issue of your network backups.  It sounds like you achieved an almost 3 fold increase in transfer rate which is very good!  I'd be happy with that as well!

The problem was not with the switch which is and has been gigabit for quite some time.  It was with running my main work machine's ethernet connection through my VOIP ATA.

Yes, this is just fine for my purposes!

I have recently upgraded from Acronis True Image Premium 2014 to Acronis True Image 2016. My backups are all booting from the CD-ROM, now DVD, since I cannot get a good image with Windows running. Unfortunately, the 2016 is running much, much slower than the 2014 and this makes no sense. There is probably a defaut on 2016 that is different than the 2014 and I need to adjust it, but I cannot find anything.

This is consistent across all of my machines including my son's mondo gaming PC. I boot from the 2014 and it rips a backup; boot from 2016 and it takes forever. Since I boot from the CD-ROM/DVD there is no way to store the settings from backup to backup, so I would have to set the option each time, but that would not be a big deal, if I knew what it was.

Perhaps there is a verification option or something else I need to check? I know Acronis did not intentionally slow it down, that would be bad for business and nonsensical. It must be something that needs adjusting.

I am booting to a backup drive over USB 3.0. However, the hardware and connection are the same independent of the version of Acronis.

Any ideas?

Robert, welcome to these user forums.

As far as I am aware there are no default settings that would make a significant difference to the performance of an offline backup using the Acronis bootable Rescue Media.  The only relevant settings are for the Compression level to be used and those for network priority which shouldn't apply to your USB 3.0 backup drive.

The other factor that may be at play here is the the Linux kernel version used in the media which is different between ATIH 2014 and 2016, plus whether you are running the 32-bit or 64-bit version of the Acronis program.

See KB document: 1537: Acronis Bootable Media which shows:

Acronis bootable media of the following products is based on Linux kernel version 3.8:

• Acronis True Image 2014
• Acronis Backup & Recovery 11.5

Acronis bootable media of the following products is based on Linux kernel version 3.11:

• Acronis Snap Deploy 5
• Acronis True Image 2015 build 5539

Acronis bootable media of the following products is based on Linux kernel version 3.15:

• Acronis True Image 2015 build 6055
• Acronis True Image 2016, Acronis True Image Cloud (Release 2016)

Another thing to do is make sure that all you PC's have the latest USB 3.0 drivers insstalled.  You must visit each machines manufacturer website support pages to look for the latest versions.  If you have recently migrated to Win 10 many user have found that Micrososfts default drivers used for the installed hardware on their machines are not well suited for the hardware.  A common problem is that of speed on USB 3.0 after the upgrade to Win 10.

As I mentioned, I am booting from the DVD, so it is running Linux, not the Windows 7 SP1 OS. I cannot update the drivers on the DVD. What I can do is look into creating a new DVD with updated build, but I an not sure Acronis allows for that.

I'm also curious if it's slower because it's running a sector-by-sector backup now?  If Acronis detects bad sectors, it will attempt to backup the entire drive, instead of just the portion that has data on it.  

Also, why are you unable to backup from within Windows?  

I suspect that 1) the upgrade did not go well.  It might be worth completely removing with the cleanup tool, rebooting, download the full 2016 installer from your account and run the installer by right clicking and "run as administrator" to start FRESH.  This will require you to create new backup scripts though (your old backups can still be reocvered with your recovery media too though.

Then, build new recovery media and try again - perhaps it will work better now as there may have been a problem with the media builder if the upgrade was part of the problem.  Any chance you can build it on a usb flash drive (2gb is all you need - usb 3.0 would be ideal since you have usb 3.0 ports).  You might find the USB media to be much more responsive too. 

2) You may want to run chkdsk /f /r on your source and destination drives and see if any errors are detected and/or repaired in the process.  I know you said this behavior is occurring on all computers, so that's why I suggest running it on the backup drive as well as it could be part of the problem.  

I have not had any issues with backup slowdown in Acronis 2015 or 2016 and use it quite often and on a very wide range of different computer systems and backup destinations.   I also started with a clean install of 2016 though and the interface between 2014 and 2016 is pretty different so that may be where the upgrade could have been part of the problem. 

Robert, you can build updated rescue media on DVD or USB stick using the Bootable Rescue Media Builder in the Tools folder, or alternatively you can download an ISO image of the standard Linux media from your Acronis Account.

If you build the WindowsPE Rescue Media then you could also include additional device drivers for your USB 3.0 controller / device should it not be recognised correctly. There is an extensive post in the Best Practices Forum that covers doing this.

I certainly did not configure it to do a sector by sector backup, although I did configure it via "disks and partitions" not "files". I am unsure why this would not be an issue for 2014 as well.

I do not backup under windows OS as it keeps modifying files as you back up, and if you do a restore the image does not always work correctly. You can backup disks and partitions that are not being used by the OS or applications, but normally the disk you boot and run the OS out of does not backup correctly under windows. Maybe they fixed that with WIN 8 or 10, but it has never worked correctly for any version of Windows I have worked with, which is 3.1/3.11/95/98/NT/XP/7. [I forbade my family under penalty of death from using Win8. They use WIN10 under their own support and I refuse to answer questions about it. The tears, the tears...of consequences.]

I also do not want to plug my backup media into a system that might have been compromised by malware. In this way if a PC gets hacked I can go back in time to an unhacked backup and restore it by blasting the image over the old one. [I have done this twice since wife said she just had to go to that web site. That website is now blocked.] (Okay, I admit second time was my fault, restored to older backup without Adobe FLASH update, and forgot to update it before I returned the PC to her. The exploit was still there.)

As I said before, since I do not boot windows, getting new drivers for that OS is not going to help.

Hey! Thank you so much. I will try that.

Booting from a USB/DVD copy of WindowsPE should work since the OS on the disk to be backed up is not running.

Robert,

I was not clear in my response.  You do need to make sure that your USB drivers are up to date in Windows.  You also need to make sure that your motherboard chipset drivers are the latest and if you are using Intel based boards you need to update IMEI drivers (Intel Management Ingine Interface) drivers as well.