Initial upload to cloud crawling

dbWizard, welcome to these user forums.

You have posted this issue in the ATIH 2017 Forum but your signature shows ATIH 2015 - is this correct?

Upload speeds to the Cloud do vary greatly depending on the system, data and ISP etc and would be expected to take a significant time to complete compared to doing a backup to a local / external or network drive.

Assuming that you are using ATIH 2015 then please see the ATIH 2015 User Guide: Performance of backup operation which has the following guidance:

Operation priority

Changing the priority of a backup or recovery process can make it run faster or slower (depending on whether you raise or lower the priority), but it can also adversely affect the performance of other running programs. The priority of any process running in a system, determines the amount of CPU usage and system resources allocated to that process. Decreasing the operation priority will free more resources for other CPU tasks. Increasing backup or recovery priority may speed up the process by taking resources from the other currently running processes. The effect will depend on total CPU usage and other factors.

You can set up the operation priority:

• Low (enabled by default) - the backup or recovery process will run slower, but the performance of other programs will be increased.
• Normal - the backup or recovery process will have the equal priority with other processes.
• High - the backup or recovery process will run faster, but the performance of other programs will be reduced. Be aware that selecting this option may result in 100% CPU usage by Acronis True Image 2015.

Network connection speed limit

When you back up data to Acronis Cloud, network drives, or FTP, you can reduce the influence of connection used by Acronis True Image on other network connections of your computer. Set the connection speed that will allow you to use Internet and network resources without annoying slowdowns.

To reduce connection speed:

• Select the Limit network connection transfer rate to check box and specify an optimal value and an appropriate measurement unit (kilobits or megabits per second).

My, bad, it is 2017 (and has been changed accordingly).

I found that I can change the priority and the connection speed, so I set the priority to Normal, but set the connection to not use more than 75MB, but it is still only utilizing, less than 10MB on a connection which should have an upload speed of over 100MB.

Everything that uses bandwidth at my house, TVs, DVR, WiFi devices,... have been turned off or disconnected and I do mean that the TV and DVR have been physically unplugged and all WiFi devices have been disabled.

So, I'm guessing that the actual upload speed is not being limited at my end, but at the Acronis end, is that correct?  If this is the case, why am I paying for 2TB of storage that I really cannot use?  The whole point of cloud storage was to minimize the opportunity for RansomWare to encrypt my local PCs and backup storage, but if I'm not going to be able to BU to the cloud every night (while I'm asleep), then this is just a waste of money.  I might as well purchase 3 more 2TB USB drives and rotate them manually.

I do not recall this issue being raised previously. Which Acroinis server are you using. There is a tool that you can use to check the connection to the server; instructions and download here. Speed is likely to be better if you choose a server closer to you. Over the years Acronis has increade the number of servers, and it may be that your default server is no longer the appropriate one. I am located in Australia, and when I first started using the Acronis cloud the choice was between a server in France or in USA. I chose the one in France. That remained the default server. I cannot remember if it is possible to change the default server - someone at Acronis did it for me. Sometimes there are advantages to being an MVP.

The speed for backups after the initial one could be slower due to the need to compare the version of files on the PC aginst the latest version in the clould backup. It is also possible that there is no problem either at your end or with the Acronis server, it may be bottleneck between you ISP and the Acronis hosting site.

Ian

Try setting the performance and network to "maximum" to see if that maxes out your speeds.  

Just to be sure, your upload is 100MB?  I get 90Mbps and my upload is also nowhere near that because of ISP limitations (see screenshot... download is 90Mbps and upload is capped by my ISP at 6Mbps).

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https://opensignal.com/knowledgebase/the-difference-between-megabyte-and-megabit.php

The Difference between a Megabyte (MB) and a Megabit (Mb)

One thing that often gives people confusion is the difference between a Megabyte (used for file size) and a Megabit (used for download speeds). People often assume that a download speed of 1 Megabit per second (1 Mbps) will allow them to download a 1 Megabyte file in one second. This is not the case, a Megabit is 1/8 as big as a Megabyte, meaning that to download a 1MB file in 1 second you would need a connection of 8Mbps. The difference between a Gigabyte (GB) and a Gigabit (Gb) is the same, with a Gigabyte being 8 times larger than a Gigabit.

To calculate how long it will take a file to download over your connection, you can use Google's simple MB/Mb converter

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Bobbo,

Thanks for your feedback.  After the current BU operation is complete, I'll try setting it to Maximum.  I'm also going to modify my BU process so that I only do incremental BU's of my C:\ drive (where my OS and program files are installed) nightly and will probably do a complete BU of that drive to the cloud once a month or so.  My E:\ drive contains my data, VM files, and Outlook (pst) files and will probably only get incremental BUs as well, at least to the cloud.  What I'm most concerned with among these are the VM files.  Each VM has about 60GB assigned to it, which includes the OS, Office, and then client files.  I'm concerned that when I make a change to a client database or Excel file that either the entire 60GB will be identified as needing the incremental BU, not just the 10GB file which the file is in.  Or worse, that these files are split over muliple 10GB files within the 60GB, and that each of those will have to be backed up.

I do understand the difference between a MBps and a Mbps, and yes, my ISP (Verizon FIOS) is supposed to accept uploads at 150Mbps, and I'm currently running at between 9 and 14 Mbps, so still less than 10% of the expected upload speed.  I will contact Verizon about this tomorrow, but the various internet speed tests are showing my upload speeds at about 125Mbps.  So, either these tests are invalid for large file transfers or something else is going on.

dbWizard wrote:

I'm also going to modify my BU process so that I only do incremental BU's of my C:\ drive (where my OS and program files are installed) nightly and will probably do a complete BU of that drive to the cloud once a month or so.

Sorry but with any Cloud backups you do not have the option to do incremental backups or new full ones in the way that you can with local backup schemes.

Cloud backups work on a delta to determine what has changed since the initial full backup and then only uploads changed data from that point forward.

Steve,

Thanks, that's great to know.  Still concerned about how Accronis True Image will handle those large Virtual Machine (VM Workstation) "files".  Do you know anything about that?

Dale

Verizon says they are able to connect at 120 Mbps and claims that Acronis must be responsible for the slow through-put, parsing out limited bandwidth on their end.

Is there a contact phone #, so we can get access to an actual tech support at  Acronis?

See KB 47145: Acronis Cloud Connection Verification Tool which will check your connection to your selected Cloud Access Point.  See KB 4350: Acronis Backup to Cloud access ports and hostnames for the list of the access points.

I would suggest using the Live Chat feature for contacting Support - see link in my signature.

dbWizard wrote:

Steve,

Thanks, that's great to know.  Still concerned about how Accronis True Image will handle those large Virtual Machine (VM Workstation) "files".  Do you know anything about that?

Dale

Dale, sorry missed this earlier question.  

Personally, I would exclude all the VM files either by folder or by file extension from your main OS backup to the Cloud, and then create separate Cloud backup tasks for each VM using the Files & Folders option instead of Disks & Partitions, as this would then be a whole lot easier to manage.

As mentioned previously, with Cloud backups, Acronis does not use the standard incremental or differential backup scheme approach, but rather does a delta comparison to identify just changed data to be uploaded after the initial full backup has been created.

Steve,

But VMWare breaks the #GB dedicated to a particular VM into what appear to be about 10GB sub files, and it appear that even the act of opening one of these VMs changes the last modified date on all of files associated with that particular VM.  So, at the rates discussed above, even backing up a single one of these VMs will upload the entire 70GB and could take up to 16 hours.

Dale, even though the file last modified data may have been changed does not mean that there will be any need to upload all the content of those files.  Acronis works at a sector level AFAIK and the delta comparison is done at that level, so I would suspect that the actual data uploaded would still be relatively small.

I have not tried this personally for any VMware VM's but it should be fairly easy to setup a small Linux VM just to test without needing to allocate 10's of GB.  I will see if I can find some time to test this tomorrow using Lubuntu in a VMware VM.

That would be a good test.  If it can truly backup a delta of just the changes in the VM file(s), that would be great.

I agree with Steve that you should back up the VM separately. I would be inclined to bakup each VM separately rather than as one backup task - depends on the number of VM you have.

Ian

Anybody know whether my license would allow me to install the Acronis software on each of the VMs, then BU each VM as it's own "machine"?

That would make the BU process significantly quicker as I probably only make modifications to 5-10 files on any given day.  Then I could remove those VM files from the main BU process and that process would run extremely quickly, as the most frequently modified fields on the PC are actually my Outlook pst files.

Dale, if I understand the licensing correctly, it is based on the hardware signature where the software is activated and as such, your VM would present a different hardware signature to the underlying host computer, so you may well see a message to the effect that you have exceeded the number of activations for your license.

I have created a Lubuntu 17.04 VM and just finished doing an initial backup (Files & Folders) to the Cloud (3.59GB) which took about 26 minutes to complete with my UK ISP allowing around 5Mbps upload speeds.

I will launch the VM and close it again then run the Cloud backup again to see how much data it uploads.

Steve,

Simply launching the VM did not seem to change the underlying file which represent the VM "machine".  But when I opened it again and created a new Excel spreadsheet, all of the files (10) of them dedicated to that VM now have a new Last Modified date.

Thanks for your efforts.

The second backup of the VM to the Cloud took approximately 90 seconds including having to scan the 3.59GB looking for any changes, though that was from just starting up then shutting down the VM even though timestamps on some of the larger files were updated.

Further test performed.  Launched the Lubuntu VM and installed LibreOffice then created a new Writer document before shutting down again.

The backup to the Cloud took 11 minutes to upload the changes to the VM files & folders and the total size of the Cloud backup has increased to 4.3GB with the new software changes included.

Nice - so it looks like the Cloud backups can handle VM files at the sector level and can parse out just the actual changes - that's a plus for Cloud backups.

Steve is correct about VM licensing.  You can install Acronis as many times as you want on the same physical machine - 100 physical disks with their own OS attached to the same motherboard will license as if they were just 1 computer.  However, VM's emulate their own hardware and get a new bios UUID for each installation.  As a result, each VM that you install the appliation in, requires it's own license going that route.

Here was the response from General Manager, Gaidar, in an earlier post: 

https://forum.acronis.com/forum/113005#comment-333732

and this too

http://www.acronis.com/en-us/company/licensing.html