Storage Spaces

Sorry but as you have noted, Acronis doesn't support the use of Storage Spaces, as documented in KB 61364: Acronis True Image does not support Storage Spaces - I have never used storage spaces so cannot advise whether any workaround is possible.

Julien,

I run a Storage Spaces array on a Windows 10 Pro Workstation build 21H1.  It is not a conventional configuration done through the normal Windows configuration tool but a custom configuration performed with Powershell.  Nevertheless I am able to backup to and restore from this array.

I am unsure if you are having issue restoring a backup of data that exists on the SS array or if you have made a backup of the array and cannot restore that?  If the later I think your issue is that SS arrays are Virtual in nature so TI does not deal with them properly. 

In my case I use the SS array as a backup destination.  As a result I do not backup the SS array itself.  If you wish to backup the SS array itself I would suggest using something like rsync.

Thanks for the replies. Somehow, I'm not getting email notifications from the forum for replies, so I just saw them.

I am backing up my Storage Spaces array on Windows onto a ZFS volume on my NAS, which is running Ubuntu. The backup succeeds, but there is no way to restore, unfortunately. I'm sure Storage Spaces would work as a destination for a backup, as any other locally available drive should, but I'm doing the reverse.

So, I tried Storage Spaces as destination for backup, to backup my NVMe boot  drive to the SATA SSD array.

It works if I use the regular backup type. It does not work if I use the Nonstop backup. True image tells me the destination is not compatible with nonstop backup. Really surprising.

A local USB drive worked for the nonstop backup. It is of course noisy and much slower.

Sadly, a dynamic disk does not work for nonstop backup either. I don't understand the reason for this. Isn't it a regular file system ? A SATA SSD in a hotswap dock does work, but I don't have a big enough large spare one for this purpose, as my boot drive is 1TB.

Julien,

Storage Spaces and dynamic disks are by definition Virtual disks and a virtual disk by its very nature does not support non-stop backup due to that technology design.  Primarily this has to do with non-stop backup requiring a specific location on a physical disk.  Virtual disks, unlike a physical disk, do not have specific locations because of this.

Enchantech wrote:

Julien,

Storage Spaces and dynamic disks are by definition Virtual disks and a virtual disk by its very nature does not support non-stop backup due to that technology design.  Primarily this has to do with non-stop backup requiring a specific location on a physical disk.  Virtual disks, unlike a physical disk, do not have specific locations because of this.

Thanks for your reply.

There were several different things I was discussing in this thread.

1) regular backup and restore of a Storage Spaces volume

As it turns out, a disk backup of this works, but file-based restore does not.

I have not tried to do a disk-based restore. Perhaps it would work, but this is not my typical use case.

2) regular backup and restoring a dynamic disk

A disk backup of this works, and file-based restore works also.

I have not tried a disk-based restore recently. I believe it might work too, if the volume is exactly the same size, but not sure. Disk-based restore is not my typical use case for the dynamic disk.

3) nonstop backup of a simple OS volume, my boot drive which is an NVMe ADATA SX8200Pro 1TB

This works when using a folder on a simple volume (hotswap SATA SSD) as destination.

It also works when using a folder on a local dynamic as destination.

It also works when using a folder on my NAS as destination. The file system is ZFS RAIDZ2 from my Ubuntu server. It's mounted via Samba/Windows file sharing.

It does not work when trying to use a folder on a Storage Spaces volume as the destination. This doesn't really make sense to me, as it should be a file system like any other. But obviously, some limitation must exist. I don't know what it is.

Julien

Julien Pierre wrote:

It does not work when trying to use a folder on a Storage Spaces volume as the destination. This doesn't really make sense to me, as it should be a file system like any other. But obviously, some limitation must exist. I don't know what it is.

As mentioned early on in this topic: KB 61364: Acronis True Image does not support Storage Spaces 

I'm well aware of that KB. It doesn't make much sense in the case of a destination volume, though, especially when the product can do a nonstop backup to NAS, for which it doesn't know the internals of the file system either.

Anyway, the nonstop backup feature is broken enough that there isn't much point in using it at all on any filesysetm, unfortunately, so I won't really miss that unless the bugs are fixed first.

Backing up/restoring a Storage Spaces volume, on the other hand, I do very much miss, but I know it's not supported. I'll wait for a perpetual license of True Image that implements this feature.

Julien Pierre wrote:

Backing up/restoring a Storage Spaces volume, on the other hand, I do very much miss, but I know it's not supported. I'll wait for a perpetual license of True Image that implements this feature.

Sorry Julien, but you are going to have a very long wait!

KB 68375: Licensing change FAQ: Acronis products switch to subscription-only licenses - where Acronis announced the demise of perpetual licenses!

Julien,

Can you tell me what configuration your Storage Spaces is?  Are you using the space as a Mirror or Parity?  Is your filesystem on the array NTFS?

Julien Pierre wrote:

.....

Anyway, the nonstop backup feature is broken enough that there isn't much point in using it at all on any filesysetm, unfortunately, so I won't really miss that unless the bugs are fixed first.

 

My understanding is the non-stop backup is either fixed, or nowhere near as broken in later versions of ATI. I did an extensive trial test and it proved to be reliable. If I recall correctly the backup was to my NAS.

You may be able to find perpetual ATI 2021 or 2020 on eBay or Amazon.

Ian

PS The above is done from memory; I suggest you do a search for posts dealing with non-stop backup to confirm the results of my testing. 

Steve Smith wrote:

Julien Pierre wrote:

Backing up/restoring a Storage Spaces volume, on the other hand, I do very much miss, but I know it's not supported. I'll wait for a perpetual license of True Image that implements this feature.

Sorry Julien, but you are going to have a very long wait!

KB 68375: Licensing change FAQ: Acronis products switch to subscription-only licenses - where Acronis announced the demise of perpetual licenses

Yes, I'm aware of this. I hope they reverse course. I won't buy another license for True Image if it's subscription, and I have upgraded nearly every year. I want my money to pay for developer time to improve features/fix bugs. Not to pay for a cloud service I can't use due to limited upload speed.

Enchantech wrote:

Julien,

Can you tell me what configuration your Storage Spaces is?  Are you using the space as a Mirror or Parity?  Is your filesystem on the array NTFS?

Neither mirror nor parity. I used a Storage Spaces volume as a stripe, with 8 columns. Here is my cheat sheet for how I created it :

Use Diskpart “clean” command to reset all array members

Create BigPool through Storage Spaces GUI

Create BigDisk through command-line

New-VirtualDisk -StoragePoolFriendlyName BigPool -FriendlyName BigDisk -ResiliencySettingName Simple -UseMaximumSize -NumberOfColumns 8

Create BigDrive through legacy Disk Manager and format as NTFS

As you see, it is NTFS.

The main advantage of Storage Spaces for me was support for the TRIM command on the individual SSDs. This is not available when using a regular striped dynamic disk. I couldn't really detect any performance difference otherwise, though. I had to revert to a dynamic disk due to lack of backup support in True Image.

I used Freefilesync to backup the Storage Spaces volume to my NAS; and then recreated the striped volume (non StorageSpaces). Then, I restored with FreeFileSync also.

FreeFileSync lacks many important features of TrueImage, such as versioning, so it was only viable for this one-time experiment.

If I wanted to play with True Image and Storage Spaces again, I would probably use Virtualbox, create a few small virtual disks of identical size, and attach them to the VM. I wouldn't do it on bare metal again given the current state of the software. At least, not with True Image 2019 which I have.

IanL-S wrote:

Julien Pierre wrote:

.....

Anyway, the nonstop backup feature is broken enough that there isn't much point in using it at all on any filesysetm, unfortunately, so I won't really miss that unless the bugs are fixed first.

 

My understanding is the non-stop backup is either fixed, or nowhere near as broken in later versions of ATI. I did an extensive trial test and it proved to be reliable. If I recall correctly the backup was to my NAS.

You may be able to find perpetual ATI 2021 or 2020 on eBay or Amazon.

Ian

PS The above is done from memory; I suggest you do a search for posts dealing with non-stop backup to confirm the results of my testing. 

Thanks. Good to hear that they have fixed bugs. I would prefer to be able to check it out for myself first before purchasing, though. I do not see where I could download the 2021 trial.

Newegg has True Image 2021 perpetual licenses for sale right now. There is a coupon that brings down the price to $30 for one license, $50 for three, and $60 for 5 (I need 5). This would be a great price if there was something compelling that 2019 didn't have, other than bug fixes. I have a really hard time giving any more of my money to Acronis for a product they will no longer support. They have already announced they would not support Windows 11 with version 2021, for example. I would need the subscription version for that. Storage Spaces support isn't coming to it either. Mainstream support for version 2021 already ended on Aug 20, 2021, so there is no hope of getting any more existing bugs fixed if I find some. And boy, do I have a long list of bugs to report that haven't been fixed for years. My bad for not spending more time reporting all of them while I had the perpetual licenses. Now that the licensing has changed, I just have to find another product, unfortunately.

Julien,

Thanks for posting your Storage Spaces configuration.  You answered the two questions I had in doing so which I expected.

I suspected you were using a Simple method of configuration here and that is at root of why you are seeing issues with Storage Spaces.  The reality is that if you wish to have such a configuration you do not need Storage Spaces at all.  You can simply configure a Spanned volume using Windows Disk Management and add as many disks as you like to it.  The only disadvantage here is that once you configure that you cannot add disk capacity like you can with Storage Spaces but you essentially end up with the same arrangement and your Spanned volume is a dynamic disk which supports your use case given your earlier post in which you said:

3) nonstop backup of a simple OS volume, my boot drive which is an NVMe ADATA SX8200Pro 1TB

This works when using a folder on a simple volume (hotswap SATA SSD) as destination.

It also works when using a folder on a local dynamic as destination.

It also works when using a folder on my NAS as destination. The file system is ZFS RAIDZ2 from my Ubuntu server. It's mounted via Samba/Windows file sharing.

It does not work when trying to use a folder on a Storage Spaces volume as the destination. This doesn't really make sense to me, as it should be a file system like any other. But obviously, some limitation must exist. I don't know what it is.

Julien

In my own use case of Storage Spaces I use a custom configuration in which I have Tiered Storage pool of disks.  That pool is a combination of HDD's and SSD's in which the SSD's act as a mirrored data cache.  The HDD's offer a Redundant Parity which essentially is a copy of all data stored via the use of the ReFS filesystem used with this pool and the Parity offered by using more than 3 disks in the pool.  That configuration is served by a dedicated Fast Data Cache using a 250 GB NVMe disk to achieve an acceptable performance level of the pooled disk array.  As an example just today I have a backup scheduled to run on a weekly basis which is a Custom Scheme Differential File/Folder configuration on a 2TB HDD.  Today that task ran a scheduled full backup of 507 GB.  This took a total time of 1 hour and 30 minutes which equate to an average of 93.89 MBps data transfer rate.  Besides this backup I also run a SyncToy task that tracks my Documents and Downloads folders.  Additionally I have a number of folders marked for Windows File History to backup to this Storage Spaces pool.  To date I have had zero issues with it. 

Enchantech wrote:

Julien,

Thanks for posting your Storage Spaces configuration.  You answered the two questions I had in doing so which I expected.

I suspected you were using a Simple method of configuration here and that is at root of why you are seeing issues with Storage Spaces.  The reality is that if you wish to have such a configuration you do not need Storage Spaces at all.  You can simply configure a Spanned volume using Windows Disk Management and add as many disks as you like to it.  The only disadvantage here is that once you configure that you cannot add disk capacity like you can with Storage Spaces but you essentially end up with the same arrangement and your Spanned volume is a dynamic disk which supports your use case given your earlier post in which you said:

3) nonstop backup of a simple OS volume, my boot drive which is an NVMe ADATA SX8200Pro 1TB

This works when using a folder on a simple volume (hotswap SATA SSD) as destination.

It also works when using a folder on a local dynamic as destination.

It also works when using a folder on my NAS as destination. The file system is ZFS RAIDZ2 from my Ubuntu server. It's mounted via Samba/Windows file sharing.

It does not work when trying to use a folder on a Storage Spaces volume as the destination. This doesn't really make sense to me, as it should be a file system like any other. But obviously, some limitation must exist. I don't know what it is.

Julien

 

In my own use case of Storage Spaces I use a custom configuration in which I have Tiered Storage pool of disks.  That pool is a combination of HDD's and SSD's in which the SSD's act as a mirrored data cache.  The HDD's offer a Redundant Parity which essentially is a copy of all data stored via the use of the ReFS filesystem used with this pool and the Parity offered by using more than 3 disks in the pool.  That configuration is served by a dedicated Fast Data Cache using a 250 GB NVMe disk to achieve an acceptable performance level of the pooled disk array.  As an example just today I have a backup scheduled to run on a weekly basis which is a Custom Scheme Differential File/Folder configuration on a 2TB HDD.  Today that task ran a scheduled full backup of 507 GB.  This took a total time of 1 hour and 30 minutes which equate to an average of 93.89 MBps data transfer rate.  Besides this backup I also run a SyncToy task that tracks my Documents and Downloads folders.  Additionally I have a number of folders marked for Windows File History to backup to this Storage Spaces pool.  To date I have had zero issues with it. 

I have never used a spanned volume, and would never use one. A spanned volume is just a bunch of disks put together, with no redundancy, and no performance increase. The only thing it buys you is the ability to change the volume when adding/removing disks to it. I'm not really interested in that ability. If I want to change the physical disks in the volume, I will back them up to my NAS, and create a new volume.

The reason I have multiple smaller (1TB) SATA SSDs, rather than a single large NVMe SATA is to increase performance, through striping.

For years, probably over a decade, I have been using striped volume with both SSDs and HDDs. With HDDs, you get more throughput, which is great for large sequential files, but also get a lot more latency which is somewhat problematic, and not good to work on locally. You also get more noise with HDDs of course.

Striping with multiple SSDs is great, though. No extra noise. Latency remains quite low.

Striping does require using drives of identical size, though. And you really should use drives of the same model & firmware. If you have one drive that's slower than the others, it will hold back the whole array.

Striping has worked fine for me with dynamic disks since the days of Windows 7. However, with SSDs, the TRIM command is not available on a Windows 10 striped dynamic disk. With Storage spaces, the TRIM command does work on a striped volume. This is my only reason for wanting to use Storage spaces.

Storage spaces does have another benefit, though. Only one virtual disk shows up in task manager, with the total read/write throughput. When using a stripe volume without storage spaces, you'll see the individual physical disks, and individual disk throughput. It takes up real estate space in task manage unnecessarily. And I what I really want to see is the total throughput, not individual. So, Storage spaces has a monitoring benefit, too, which I didn't know about until I started using it.

I do not use mirroring or parity with my dynamic disk or Storage spaces. Never have. I mostly rely on my NAS for nightly incremental (or differential) backups.

I had never tried using the Nonstop backup until recently. I have found it much less reliable than the regular backup. It also slows the machine down. And you can't use Try & decide anymore, also, if you use it. So, I'll probably stick with the regular backup, anyway.

For me, 93 MBps is not an acceptable transfer rate. But I'm backing up to NAS over 10 Gig ethernet. The NAS still has some performance issues, and cannot max the 10gig ethernet with ZFS RaidZ2 and compression on, with the 8 x 14TB easystore drives.

bagaudin from Acronis helped me on reddit. He found out that CPHO works with Storage Spaces for many use cases in a VM. I verified it in a VM myself last night as well, but with a striped Storage spaces volume. I then found that there is still a TIH 2021 trial version available for download at https://www.acronis.com/en-us/homecomputing/thanks/acronis-true-image-2… . I downloaded it onto my VM, and verified that it works just as well as CPHO with Storage spaces for my use cases.

So, I did an incremental backup of my striped dynamic disk onto my NAS, using TIH 2019.

I then wiped the dynamic disk, and created a striped 8TB Storage spaces.

I did a file restore using TIH 2019 from NAS.

That took 6h24min for 4.3TB, for 368,974 files recovered. About 186 MBps. Still much less than the 1 GB/s that should be possible from my 112TB disk array on the NAS I was restoring from, the 10 Gbps NIC on both machines, and the 4.4 GB/s SSD array I was restoring to (8 x Samsung 860 SSD). But there was compression involved on the ZFS side. Compression was turned off in TIH 2019.

I just upgraded my TIH2019 to TIH2021 trial version. I'm now doing a full backup of both the boot drive and Storage spaces drive onto the NAS. It looks like it's going to be about 3 hours.

Will be testing restore, also. Is there an MVP tool that works with TIH 2021 ? I need to add the Aquantia 10 Gbps NIC driver to WinPE boot media at the minimum.

Given that this seems to work, I did order a 5-license boxed version of TIH 2021 from Newegg for $60 + tax. Might be the last version I ever buy, but at least I get some respite and time to find something else that's not subscription-based.

Julien,

So I misspoke when I said Spanned, I meant  to say Stripped.  At any rate you understand the risks with striped disks and that's fine.  I use striped configurations as well and know full well of the speed increases obtainable.

You can use the MVP ATIPEBuilder tool to create media for TI 2021.  Be advised that you can also add drivers via the Acronis Bootable Media Builder tool as well.  A link to the MVP tool appears below:

MVP WinPE Media Builder

As information I too run a NAS that uses ZFS Z2 but not on a 10 gig network.  It suits my needs just fine.  I also run a second NAS that uses the BrtFS file system, it is slightly slower but suits my needs as well.

I was awaiting your reply back to pass along that Ti 2021 and the new Cyber Protect Home Office product do work with Storage Spaces but seems you already discovered that.

Enjoy!

Enchantech wrote:

Julien,

So I misspoke when I said Spanned, I meant  to say Stripped.  At any rate you understand the risks with striped disks and that's fine.  I use striped configurations as well and know full well of the speed increases obtainable.

You can use the MVP ATIPEBuilder tool to create media for TI 2021.  Be advised that you can also add drivers via the Acronis Bootable Media Builder tool as well. 

 

As information I too run a NAS that uses ZFS Z2 but not on a 10 gig network.  It suits my needs just fine.  I also run a second NAS that uses the BrtFS file system, it is slightly slower but suits my needs as well.

I was awaiting your reply back to pass along that Ti 2021 and the new Cyber Protect Home Office product do work with Storage Spaces but seems you already discovered that.

Enjoy!

 Echantech,

Storage Spaces with a striped volume buys me, so far :

1) ability to have the TRIM command work

2) single stripe drive showing in task manager, as opposed to individual member drives

These things don't work if creating a striped volume without Storage Spaces.

Thank you for the link to the MVP tool. I have used it before with previous versions of ATI (2018/2019) to add the drivers and NAS mount. Haven't tried it with 2021 yet. I don't have all the required dependencies installed anymore.

Indeed , ATI 2021 and CPHO do seem to work with Storage Spaces, except for the nonstop backup case, but I won't need to use that.

Unfortunately, I have found ATI 2021 to be much, much slower than 2019, even with the cyber protection deactivated. I will post a separate thread about that.

So, I found that backups of Storage Spaces volume made with ATI 2019 are restorable with ATI 2021, either in disdk mode or file mode.

Ie. ATI 2019 can backup Storage spaces, but not restore from it.

ATI 2021 can do both, but is a lot slower at backing up when using TIBX files.

ATI 2021 is slower at backing up when using TIB files also, but not as much.

Julien,

Your conclusion are correct.  I believe there are many factors at work that make your conclusions so.  The 2019 product was designed from a performance leaning view.  That introduced the situation of some low power PC's resources being consumed to the point of not being able to operate other tasks while backups were running and that in turn gave rise to outcries form the user base to fix that issue.

So beginning with 2020 some form of throttling of that performance was introduced along with many other changes that effected performance.

As for the Storage Spaces part of this, I never tried using 2019 with Storage Spaces and I would not have wanted to knowing what I do about Storage Spaces technology. 

Enchantech wrote:

Julien,

Your conclusion are correct.  I believe there are many factors at work that make your conclusions so.  The 2019 product was designed from a performance leaning view.  That introduced the situation of some low power PC's resources being consumed to the point of not being able to operate other tasks while backups were running and that in turn gave rise to outcries form the user base to fix that issue.

So beginning with 2020 some form of throttling of that performance was introduced along with many other changes that effected performance.

As for the Storage Spaces part of this, I never tried using 2019 with Storage Spaces and I would not have wanted to knowing what I do about Storage Spaces technology. 

SMH. Couldn't those users just set the backup task priority to low ? Most of the time, my backups run at night while I'm not using the machine. But not always. TI 2019 has always been just fine as a background task. Longer backups mean more power consumption and more $$$ spent on electricity, which is a big consideration for me. More than the cost of the software for sure.

Not sure about the Low priority setting.  As I recall doing that made no difference.  On my pc's maxing out the CPU does not cause issue either as that condition is limited to short bursts however, I run enthusiast grade motherboards with K processors so I expect that to be the case. 

Enchantech wrote:

Not sure about the Low priority setting.  As I recall doing that made no difference.  On my pc's maxing out the CPU does not cause issue either as that condition is limited to short bursts however, I run enthusiast grade motherboards with K processors so I expect that to be the case. 

My current CPUs are AMD 5950x (main desktop), AMD 2700 (HTPC #1), i5-6600k (NAS), i5-6400 (HTPC #2). I haven't noticed any problems with backups even on the slowest one of those, the i5-6400 . However, it's the only machine that's doing backups over Wifi, through a Unifi NanoHD bridge. It can only backup at about 350 - 400 Mbps due to that, different order of magnitude than the 3 others that are all on 10GBase-T. Maybe pairing slower I/O with slowest CPU was a good idea. I do enable the compressionin TIH  on that i5-6400, though. Whereas for the others, I disable it, and just let the NAS do it on the ZFS side, since the bottleneck isn't the network.

Still have a hard time imagining TIH bringing a system to its knees unless someone has some crazy old IDE drive without UltraDMA, or has enabled "Maximum" compression on a very old slow single-core CPU. I don't know how many people still use those, though ...

Julien,

The majority of users of the product are laptop users and of those most are not gaming or highend machines.  There is a world of difference between a laptop system and a desktop system just like there is a world of difference between a enthusiast built system vs an OEM offering from the likes of Dell, HP, etc.  The mainstream systems are those that would choke on the 2019 product. 

Enchantech wrote:

Julien,

The majority of users of the product are laptop users and of those most are not gaming or highend machines.  There is a world of difference between a laptop system and a desktop system just like there is a world of difference between a enthusiast built system vs an OEM offering from the likes of Dell, HP, etc.  The mainstream systems are those that would choke on the 2019 product. 

I see. Indeed, I can see that some laptops that are underspecced when it comes to RAM and CPU might choke. One of the many reasons I have never bought a laptop, and probably never will. Others include the horrible input devices - small keyboard, touchpad that I'm pretty much allergic to, small displays, and so on.

Nevertheless, I think the software should be able to function well on all types of systems. And on a fast system, with a lot of $$$ invested in CPU and fast I/O, the software shouldn't be the bottleneck.

As I said the MAJORITY of user are these under powered laptop owners so the majority rules.

There are other reason why 2020 and 2021 do not perform as well as 2019 did on top grade equipment.  Error checking and data tracking are the most obvious.

Enchantech wrote:

There are other reason why 2020 and 2021 do not perform as well as 2019 did on top grade equipment.  Error checking and data tracking are the most obvious.

Are there any detailed documents about what those improvements are ?

For what it's worth, I have found another difference with Storage Spaces stripe mode vs using a stripe volume dynamic disk.

Storage spaces can be restored in disk mode. Dynamic disk stripe volume cannot. You have to use file restore, which is much slower. This is true in ATI 2021.

That would be one more reason to use Storage spaces vs dynamic disk, even for a striped volume.

Hello Julien,

I've added your comments as a vote for the feature request TI-22589 Support Windows Storage Spaces, however should note that the chances of implementation are very low for now 😔

Ekaterina wrote:

Hello Julien,

I've added your comments as a vote for the feature request TI-22589 Support Windows Storage Spaces, however should note that the chances of implementation are very low for now 😔

Ekaterina,

Thanks for responding.

Good news - I have since found out that Storage Spaces backup/restore does work in ATI 2021, so there is nothing left to do.

Unfortunately, the backup performance of ATI 2021 is lower than ATI 2019, for many reasons :

- forced use of compression with TIBX format vs TIB format .
- backup takes a lot longer to start about 30 s to 1 minute longer. Not really sure why, but I would guess it's partly because of the Cyber protection features that can't be turned off.