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Full backups: First one completes quickly, subsequent backups take 2x to 4x as long

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Patrick, your screen image shows that you are making only Full backup images, and this is for a large volume of source data (3.2 TB with a backup size of 2.4 TB), where the initial backup took 6 hours 46 minutes, but the subsequent full backups were both stopped quickly at 56 minutes and 20 minutes, so doesn't demonstrate the 2x to 4x time given in your topic title.

Acronis has always tended to err on the pessimistic side when estimating the time needed for backups, so it is fairly normal to see the task saying some horrendous times which then come down significantly as the backup task progresses.

I would expect that each of your full backups would average around the same 6+ hours time with some allowances for changes to the source data and other activities happening on your PC during the backup operation.

Also, there is time spent at the beginning of a backup prior to actually starting to write the backup. That time will really distort the speed figures when stopping the backup early.

I concur with Steve that if you just allow it to run and ignore the time remaining indication it should be consistent with your first backup.

There are several of us where subsequent large full backup times dramatically increase each time.  I wish I knew why.

For my wife's 5TB backup I alternate between two backup jobs and create a new backup each time rather than allow the default behavior.  That way it's always the first backup (along with incrementals).

I opened a ticket last year with Acronis but after several logs and tests back and forth nothing was resolved.

I started the backup at 3:46am LTZ. It's now 9:53pm and my 2nd full backup is still going.

There is something going wrong after the first backup that is beyond my current understanding.

If you are running validations with each backup, that will cause it to increase each time as the validation then runs against all backups.

My recommendation is to not run validations when the backup is made. They can be run later when desired and also you can then choose to just validate the latest backup instead of all prior backups.

Thanks for the reply. I have validations turned off in the settings.The backup is still going....

Patrick, there is obviously an issue here with very large backups using .tibx format based on your experience and I have to recommend that you open a Support ticket with Acronis so that they can investigate why this is.

See also forum topic: Slow Performance for 2nd Full Backup - where another user has reported the same issue and already has opened a support case, though not got anywhere so far!

There are a couple of possible options to suggest at this point:

  1. Assuming that this is a disk backup using .tibx files, then see forum topic: How to create a Disk backup as .tib (not .tibx) which will create a new backup task using the older .tib format in the Windows ATI 2020 / 2021 GUI.
     
  2. Consider using a Post command to rename your Full backup after it is created, so that the next Full backup is again a 'first backup' for the task (because the previous one is not found!).  Let me know if you are interested in this option as I have been playing with this a little while back and it was working fine for keeping full backups completely independent of each other when using .tibx files.

 

Steve,

Thanks for the reply. I think I will open a support ticket.

Patrick, good luck with the support ticket.

I have done some limited testing of full disk backups this morning for my laptop NVMe M.2 500GB SSD drive to my external USB 3 HDD using the second option above (renaming the backup via a Post Command) and saw the following results.

The source data was only 105GB which is fairly typical for my systems but as shown above, the second run of the task was actually 5 minutes faster than the first run!

I am using a small rename utility (tibdlink.exe) created by MVP BrunoC when looking at the issue of dependencies with .tibx Full backups - the utility adds the extra date stamp text to the file name and alters the extension from .tibx to .~tibx.

I don't have any disks of the size that you have been using on any of my systems so cannot test this approach with such larger volumes of data.

Steve,

Thanks for the reply! I would like to try the post command you've mentioned.

Where can I download the utility?

Thanks!

Patrick

Patrick, I will attach a password protected zip of the utility and send you a PM with the password.

The Post Command is a small Windows batch file which includes a description of the options for the utility.

The 2 attached files were named as tibdlink3.zip and tibdlink-bat.txt when attached but will normally be renamed by the forum software!

Attachment Size
557227-206556.zip 5.04 KB
557227-206558.txt 1.25 KB

Hi all,

Same issue here. This occurred after the first time the oldest backup was automatically removed. I'm configured to run incremental, twice a day, with a new full backup after every 14 incremental ones. It has an option to remove any backups older than 24 days. 

I had a few full backups work fine until one was aged out and removed. Now I can't back up without it estimating to take a week to complete. I'll contact technical support.