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Creating a combination 'Rescue Media' and 'Acronis 2021 Full Restore' on a Single USB 3.0 Memory Stick

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My first post.  Hope it's appropriate for this Forum.

I recently upgraded from a perpetual Acronis 2016 license to a perpetual Acronis 2021 license.

For years I've had Acronis backup my PC to a Western Digital 'My Book' 10TB NTFS formatted USB 3.0 external drive with no problems and will probably continue to do so with the new Acronis 2021 software, but I wanted some dissimilar redundancy so I purchased a large USB 3.2 memory stick to use as both an emergency bootable USB, and as storage for a full PC backup.

The USB 3.2 memory stick came with a FAT32 format.  The Acronis 2021 'Rescue Media Builder' recognized the USB stick and built the bootable media.  It also allowed me to create a folder in the Rescue Media to store a full Acronis 2021 PC backup.  However I noticed the backup was broken up into many 4GB files due to the FAT32 format file size limit.  The backup process to the USB 3.2 memory stick didn't take more than an hour.

For personal preferences I wanted Acronis 2021 to build a single backup file, not a parsed one.  To accomplish this I created 2 partitions each with a unique drive letter assigned (F: and G:) on the one USB 3.2 memory stickThe F: drive is a 3GB FAT32 partition and the G: drive is a 227GB NTFS partition.  I did this because the Acronis 2021 'Rescue Media Builder' wouldn't recognize any USB stick with an NTFS format.  Acronis 2021 created the bootable Rescue Media file in the small FAT32 partition quickly.  But Acronis 2021 says it is going to take almost 2 days to make the full backup it is currently creating.

  1. Why is it taking so long to create a single backup file? 
  2. Would a restore likewise take 2 days?
0 Users found this helpful

More information would be helpful. What are you backing up, and approximate size?

ATI is notoriously inaccurate it’s time estimates, so this may be part of the problem.

Pleas confirm that you have attached the USB stick to a USB 3 port; not all USB port perform equally.; ones on the backplane are more reliable than ones that involve an expansion port on the motherboard such as those on the front of the case.

You seem to have used a roundabout means of creating an Acronis Survival Kit! Whenever you are creating a backup task that uses an USB storage device as target there is an option to create a Survival Kit that does exactly what you wish. (See user guide, section 2.4.) 

Ian