Cloud backup time
I recently bought 250 GB of cloud storage from Acronis. Currently, I am running Windows 7 64 bit with all current updates. System backup image size is about 50 GB.
Using Acronis' one-click backup to cloud I attempted a backup image (perhaps stupidly as I hadn't considered the broadband transmission time). The 'backup' consumed about 10 hours and had only backed up about 20 GB when I, finally, killed it. I also deleted the incomplete backup using the rather difficult 'Managing Backups' instructions given by Acronis. As a comment, it should be much easier to do this.
So, now, it is not clear to me whether or not I am doing something totally wrong or if cloud backup is simply not feasible for dealing with system images. Perhaps, I should be using some kind of incremental backup to handle this. Any advice would be appreicaed. My broadband connection rate, by the way, is about 26 mbps.
Ditto to Steve. Most ISP's offer assymetrical download/upload speeds where upload is about 1/10th (or less) of what's available from the advertised download speed (unless you have fiber going straight to the house... DSL and cable are almost always assymetrical). I get 100Mb down from the big "C" cable provider, but 10Mb up. On average, I actually see about 5Mb when uploading though as I suspect my uploads are throttled as well since I've pushed several hundred GB to the Cloud and am a frequent uploader to Google Drive and other sites as well.
On a side note, but related, the Cloud backups pick up where you leave off. You can pause them at anytime. And, once your full backup has completed, subsequent backups to the cloud are deltas from the last backup where only the changes from the last backup (wherever it left off) are backed up. This will make future backups much faster.
However, just as with uploading, if you had to revert to the cloud for a system restore, it would be pretty slow too.
Cloud is great for offsite disaster recovery and redundancy, but is not ideal for a single/primary backup location in most cases. You would be best served using an external drive or some other drive, NAS etc, for local backups which will be fast and convenient, but also using a second backup to the could for disaster, emergency situation (like if your house caught on fire and took out your main hard drive and the local backup).
Another benefit of the Cloud is you can log into the account from any web browser and recovery files/folders to that system so it may come in handy if you're remote and need to get something from the backup and can't get to the home computer or home backup.
Mea culpa! I forgot about the asymmetric speed situation. My upload speed is about 5 mbps. I do have a usb 3.0 external disk that I have been using for acronis backup. I intended the cloud as was suggested as disaster storage.
Acronis Cloud is definitely best as a supplementary backup. While you can recover from the Cloud using the Recovery Media, it is a slow process. It appears that for a full recovery (to empty HDD) it takes a long time, restoring to origianl location appears to only deal wth files that are different - this is much faster.
Ian