Does TrueImage Reduce SSD Boot Drive Life

Not sure what is going on. ATI 2019 is SSD compatible, however, there have been issues reported with 32 gig Optane drives which are used for caching (but those are related to backing up of the system drive). My understanding that that issue has been addressed in ATI 2021 (and possibly ATI 2020). 

To fully understand we need much more information. Please provide details of the model of the Intel SSD (including its size). We need to eliminate the possibility that it is a 32 gig Optane cache. If the drive in question is an Optane caching drive then it may well be be operating as intended. The caching is managed by the Intel driver, not by ATI 2019.

Please also provide details of the backup task - what are you backing up; one partition or multiple partitions. Please confirm that you are doing a full backup each day, and not using either incremental or differential backup.

Ian

The boot drive is an Intel 665p 2TB.  I have a 450 GB folder on an external USB 3.0 drive that is being backed up to another external USB 3.0 hard drive.  This particular backup was a full backup with all future backups intended to be incremental (this is a backup of a dropbox style folder).  However, I also do a full backup of the 665p boot drive to an external USB 3.0 hard drive then do twice a week incremental backups for 8 backups then repeat the full/8 incrementals from now on.  But if the 0 byte tib file on the external disk is being built on the 665p boot SSD before being placed on the external drive, it will destroy my SSD in short order (the drive is 6 months old and has had 20% of its write life consumed).

William, thanks for the additional information. The Intel drive is clearly not an Optane cache drive.

The situation you describe does sound rather odd. Unfortunately I cannot be of assistance; this sort of thing is well beyond my expertise.

The only suggestion I have is to contact Acronis technical support - if you are using ATI 2020 or earlier, free support will have expired. So there is a problem there. You could make a pre-sales inquiry on the basis that you are considering upgrading to ATI 2021.

I am not seeing a similar issue in terms of life span reduction, it could (unlikely) be related to the particular model of SSD, or it could be that what you are doing is so different to what I and many other users do - very large backups made every day - that we are just not picking up on it. Not many home users would be doing what you are, and possibly the same for small business users. It may be that Acronis Cyber Backup or Acronis Cyber Protect are more suited to your needs, but this is something on which I do not have expertise.

Maybe someone else in the user community made be able to assist in resolving this issue.

Ian

In ATI 2010 the architecture used for disk and partitions backups was changed -  it is the same as that used in Acronis Cyber Backup 12.5. As you are doing a disk and partitions backup, may I suggest that you test to see if the same thing happens when using ATI 2021.

First, save you backup settings (open ATI, click on "Settings" then click on "save settings to file at the right bottom".

Next, download the trial version of ATI 2021 here. Before installing ATI 2021, make sure that you disconnect the USB drive on which you backups are stored. After installing ATI 2021 (you can install it over ATI 2019), restore you settings (this is done on the same tab as saving the settings). Many users find the Cyber Protection modules of ATI 2021 to be something they do not want. As you would be merely testing ATI I suggest disabling everything, click on "Turn off Protection" at the bottom left of the "Protection" tab. Next click on "Settings" on bottom right, and then select the "Antivirus scan" tab, and half way down click on "do not schedule".

Next, attach the USB drive to which you make backups, and create a new disk and partitions backup that replicates the one you are currently use - it will create a backup using the *.tibx architecture rather than the *,tib architecture used in ATI 2019. [Files and folders backups still use *.tib.] Make sure use a new directory in which the backup will be saved. The validation of *.tibx files takes substantially longer, so I would disable validation when setting up the backup task. You can validate manually later if you think ATI 2021 is worth persevering with.

Acronis is attempting to force users to move to a subscription rather than perpetual licence; to get a perpetual licence you will need to buy it from a third party supplier, however some regions (such as EU) will only have subscription licences. If you are in North America or Australia, they are continuing to offer perpetual licences, but only through third party suppliers.

Before you ask, you can still run your old backups. If you move back to ATI 2019, backup made with ATI 2021 will not be recognised, so create recovery media before you uninstall ATI 2021.

To minimise inconvenience you could run ATI using a virtual machine; I use VMWare to run Virtual machines. But I would only do this if you are an experienced VMWare user as setting up virtual machines takes a bit of time.

Ian

Thanks Ian.  I will give that a try.  I will be buying a larger external drive soon, so I can try the trial version of ATI risk free. 

I also took a look at Windows 10 Resource Monitor. I have discovered another culprit writing to my SSD.  I keep a lot of chrome tabs open.  When chrome is running its IndexedDB process is constantly writing 16 to 50 MB/s.  I estimate that is at least 1 TB a day.  That makes any usage by ATI pale in comparison.  Looks like I am going to have to keep my most frequently used tabs open in Edge and only launch Chrome when I need to move between multiple tabs frequently.  

William, if you are using a recent version of Edge, it is based on Chrome so it may act in the same way.

Ian

William, I have no such issues running ATI 2019 with an SSD boot drive.

I see you have an internal HDD. If you can ascertain where the heavy writes are occurring, you could force that to the HDD instead of SSD. A simple mklink junction could do it.

I do not keep my temp folders on my boot SSD. On one system, it's on a HDD while on another it's on a second SSD. But no real problems.

I keep a spreadsheet of SSD usage and periodically update it. My C: drive is 51 months old and has averaged 7.53 GB/day, and has written 5.68% of its 200 TBW spec. My D: drive (where I keep temp folders) is 23 months old and has averaged 3 GB/day and is only 0.68% of its 300 TBW spec.

BrunoC, good point on using symbolic links.  I am used to using them in unix but it has been over 15 years since using on a PC.  Is that how you keep your temp folders on another drive?  Or do you alter Windows parameters?  Will also try on Chrome IndexedDB write location, which is writing about 1 TB a day to my SSD (I keep over 30 tabs open and Google recently disabled my suspender extension).  Good thing I have 2TB SSDs with greater write life (600 TBW or under 2 years of running Chrome with 30+tabs). 

I have already moved my indexes over to an internal HDD.  And of course disabled hibernation. Speaking of indexes, any idea why when I search for a file by name (e.g. mydocument.doc) it can take 10 minutes or more when an Oracle search would return in a few milliseconds.  Worse, it frequently returns nothing!!! Even if you find the file and search within the folder containing the file.

William,

For the temp folders, you need to edit your environment variables. Go to Settings->System->About and click on Advanced System Settings and the Environment Variables... Change both User and System, both TEMP and TMP.

Some system folders, e.g. Photos, Videos, etc, you can select the properties of the folder and use the Location tab.

I don't use indexing myself. There's a program called Everything which I use for fast searching for a file.

And then I use mklink for other stuff.

Thanks for all the great advise BrunoC and IanL-S.  My conclusion is that all the writing wearing out my SSD were coming from a chrome extension called Tabs Outliner that I had allowed to build up 50K+ tabs that could be launched...still don't know why that caused all the writing.  I will have to look at my temp folders to see if they are also read from.  If they are written to but not read from then will move to a HDD.  But if read from will leave on SSD.

I will look at Everything, because Windows search is SLOW and it frequently can't find a file that you give the full name and extension search in the same DAMN folder as the file.
 

Thanks for the update William; explains why neither BrunoC nor I had experienced the extreme writes.

Ian