Acronis True Image Home 2011 Incredibly Slow - Windows 7 64-bi

Dennis,

What is the actual time you see upon completion? The time estimates are often completely out of whack.

The time is fairly accurate. I've run the backup to completion once and it took at least 20 hours.

Here it is after it's been running for 2 hours now.  Looks like about 10% done, which jibes with the original estimate.

Dennis

Tried changing the priority from Low to High and Compression from Normal to none, this doubled the predicted time and slowed progress significantly.

Dennis,

If you change the destination to another disk (for example a USB disk), do you see a difference?

Let's see if this is a destination disk issue or a source disk issue or some software issue...

Sometimes, just updating the snapapi.sys driver speeds things if it is a software issue.

Backing up 250GB of data would take 50mn on my system with an SSD to eSata, with an effective compression ratio of 50% on normal.

Thanks Pat.

If I change the destination from the RAID 10 array on the same host to a USB drive on the network (attached to the USB port on my router) then the estimate drops to about 2 hours, 19 minutes. So I suspect something about the RAID array is what Acronis is having problems with. It's four 250 MB drives operating in RAID 10 configuration off of a HighPoint RocketRAID 2300 PCI-E X1 SATA-II 3 GB/sec RAID controller. I'll see if I can update the driver.

Where can I find a snapapi.sys driver?

Regards,

Dennis

Turns out the Highpoint RocketRAID drivers were up to date, and the RAID array manager shows everything is working normally.

I found a snapapi.sys driver at http://kb.acronis.com/sites/default/files/content/2011/04/20350/snapapi…, I'm wondering if that's the latest?

I doubt the snapapi.sys will address the issue with the RAID array. You have the right link/version, and I don't think it hurts to try.
Another thing to try is to disable all non-Microsoft and non-Acronis services/startup items in msconfig, reboot and see if that solves anything (I am not hopeful).

Apparently TI is NOT compatible with a Highpoint RocketRAID RAID-10 drive array. When I replugged the USB drive to a local connection, Acronis estimated backup time at 1 hour 5 minutes. It appears to be running fine now, seems to be segmenting the backup into 4 GB "chunks" but I think that's normal, likely for some FAT32 limitation.

Dennis

Backup ran to successful completion on the USB drive. So it's definitely a compatibility problem between TI 2011 and a Highpoint RocketRAID RAID-10 drive array. I'm definitely going to look around for another backup solution, Acronis sure isn't it.

Thanks for your help,

Dennis

As a note without knowing much of your specific application and context, storing your backups on a RAID set up is a waste. Backups should definitely available, but you have little need for high performance throughput or data protection (medium/location diversification is more important). Buy an inexpensive big USB disk or maybe eSata/USB 3.0 for your backups and use your RAID 10 for "production" (my setup)

Turns out I was wrong. The RocketRAID array manager had reported the array as "healthy" after repeated rescans, but when I tried to verify the sub-arrays one of them turned out to have a bad drive. It was a WD SATA 3 drive what didn't have any errors but broke during verification and, when I tried to rebuild it, it ended up taking forever to rebuild (after 2 hours it was 2% done). So I can only conclude that something internal to the drive was slowing it down drastically. Likely due to huge number of error retries, although the SMART drive data doesn't show any unusual errors.

After replacing the drive with a Seagate Barracuda and rebuilding the RAID array, I ran the back-up with Acronis in 28 minutes. But I'm taking your advice, I've got a 750 MB USB drive that works fine locally with Acronis and backs up in 40 minutes that I'm using from now on.

Thanks again,

Dennis

By the way, I'd never use the RAID 10 array for production. I had it originally configured as the boot drive for my system, thinking that it would be much more reliable. However, after the configuration nightmare (getting the drivers to install during the Windows 7 setup) and RAID support in Windows sucks majorly. It ended up being a mess from a reliability standpoint. It's a 4-drive array and I generally lose 1 drive every few months. It's easy to hot plug them (they slide into a front-loaded set of trays with doors) but every time a drive would fail, I'd inevitably have boot problems because Windows 7 couldn't handle it. So I got a regular 1 TB SATA drive that I use as a boot drive and use the RAID array to back-up data.

Hi,
I just created a RAID 10 array with four WD 1 Tb HDD.
I did not encountered any slowing down of back-up (about 90 Mb/s with external HDD USB 3.0 and Intel motherbaord). The rate is about 50% higher if I compare with my previous RAID 1 volume built with the same HDD.
The very new information is the very short lifetime of HDD. What kind of HDD are you using to have a so bad lifetime ?
Right now you may find HDD with high performances and long waranty (up to 5 years) and more than 1,200,000 hours of lifetime.

Hello Jacques,

I've had nothing but problems with Western Digital drives in my RAID array. I've replaced them one-by-one as they failed with Seagate Barracuda 2s. The WD drive I was using is the WD2500KS WD Caviar SE16 model. Seems to work fine with a new drive.

Regards,

Dennis

Hello,
I had a similar problem when trying to backup Windows 7 Pro (64-bit) onto a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo running RAID 1. Acronis TI 2012 was showing 13 hours plus. I cancelled the backup and changed the destination to an external hard drive using a USB 2.0 connection and the time dropped to 32 minutes.
-Chuck

I have a similar problem backing up to a non-raid USB drive with the write policy set to permit caching. Projected and actual backup of 89 gb is 48 hours+. Just after I changed the drive policy it did 1 backup in 1 hour, then back to 48 hours with NO changes in the hardware.
Thread is http://forum.acronis.com/forum/25833#comment-80275
This is also win7 64 bit, with 4 cores and 16 gb of memory. backup priority is set to high, compression to normal. CPU usage fluctuates between 0 and 6% with none of the cores going above 20%.

I sure wish I had some idea of what is going on.
bill

William,

Did you actually let the backup run? The times estimates of ATI are outrageously wrong.

It is hard to guess why a backup takes 1hour and then a way longer time without any changes to the configuration. You could run a chkdsk /r on the disk to backup.

Yes I did, estimated at "> 1 day (on the 2nd day of the backup), actually ran for 2 1/2 days.
I think this is a win7/usb drive problem, not ati, but still renders backup impossible as I can not get a "snapshot" of the computer's state at any night.

Non-stop backup is running to the same usb drive, could that be interfering ?

bill

I had NSB and regular backups running to the same disk, and didn't see any issues.

It is worth trying to disable the non-stop backup services in services.msc

I updated snapAPIs and on the first backup after the restart it is running with an extimated backup time of 1 hour, which seems to be accurate.
This happened once before - the first backup after a restart ran in just over an hour. We will see how it works for the next backup.

I have similar problems using True Image 2013, backing up to a WD SmartBook using USB3. Same problem using USB2. 300 GByte takes about 80 hours to complete, but does complete successfully if left this time. My motherboard is an Asus P8 Z77 V-Pro with built-in USB3 support. Processor is an Intel i7, 16GB RAM. If I switch the backup destination disk to an oldish 320GB over SATA6, backup time is less than half an hour. The WD SmartBook seems to work fine with all other programs. All firmware and drivers are up to date.

My solution is to unplug the USB drive during boot. If I plug it in after boot it runs fine with backup in 1 hour range. If I leave it plugged in during boot the backup time is > 3 days.

Thanks for the input, William. I have just tired unplugging the USB drive, rebooting, reconnecting the USB drive and then trying a backup. Unfortunately, no luck - just the same.

Don't connect via a hub, a port in a monitor, a USB extension cord, etc. Connect the external drive directly to a USB port on the rear of the computer case. See if that works better. If not, try another rear port, and try a new cable.

Also, if the SmartBook includes power management, perhaps it is powering down at various points to save energy, thus interrupting and delaying the backup.

Thanks for that, Tuttle. I am connecting directly to the USB ports. I don't think the cable can be at fault because the USB drive seems to work OK with other programs.

I have TI 2013 family pack for 3PCs. On the old XP system TI runs at the same speed as TI2010. On the "better" PC under Win 7 64bit system a full back-up to the same external drive (Hitachi Simple Drive via USB) takes 36 hours. Stand-alone backup from the installation CD on the Win 7 PC to the same eternal drive on the same USB port takes two hours. My TI 2013 is build 6514. Sync Agent-Version 16,0,0,6682. So I do not back-up whilst working on Win 7.

On my laptop under Win7 professional TI2013 works at the hoped-for speed.

It sounds as though something running under Windows is interfering with the backup, or hogging USB bandwidth. Does your external drive include any utilities that could be running, or does it have power management features that under Windows could be reducing drive performance? Many "green" drives slow down backup speed.

I do not know why, but I found that I can "fix" the problem by unplugging the usb drive during restart and plugging it back in after I get to the login screen. Probably just magic, but it works.

Don't unplug until you get to the end of the shutdown to prevent corruption.

During the 36 hour backup there were at least 14 hours when there was no other activity on the PC. Task Manager did not show me anything to make me suspicious. With the old Acronis this PC would make long bursts to the Hitachi backup medium, followed by a short click, as shown on the activity light, and immediately continue with the next burst. Streaming? Now with TI 2013 it does a short activity to the backup and there is a noticeable pause before the next short activity. I also have a Verbatim 3 terra and the process is similar. The Verbatim is Fat32, the Hitachi Simple Drive is NTFS. I'll disconnect one device from the back of the PC and try the backup using the USB port at the back. The PC is from Arlt and the USB's are version 2. Acronis backup used to run in half the time on the Arlt that the ancient Dell with it's Win XP system took. Now with Win 7 I measure the backup time in days.

TonyDitt wrote:

try the backup using the USB port at the back.

I suggested that several posts ago.

Run chkdsk /r on each partition of the internal drive, and on the external HD. If there are hidden partitions, assign letters to them so you can chkdsk.
Also run a drive checking utility from the drive manufacturer, as those sometimes catch errors missed by chkdsk.

Slow backup is generally caused by hardware or connection issues.

OK, I'm a 70 year old beginner. I dsconnected a USB device at the back of the PC and connected the Hitachi Simple Drive there. I also allowed the Win 7 to correct the problems that it claimed were present on the Hitachi. I hadn't wanted to do this in case I lost my backups from the other PCs. But, hey ho, let's live a bit. Now the TI 2013 is doing backup on the Win 7 PC at an express rate. So I do not know why the USB at the back is better than the USB at the front, it is more difficult to find and I lose the other device. Or perhaps the 'cleaning' of the Hitachi external disk did the trick. If anybody has an explanation for front and back USBs then I'd be pleased to learn. I'll do a few experiments to try to sort out what was wrong. Thanks for your help.
Tony

TonyDitt wrote:

OK, I'm a 70 year old beginner. I dsconnected a USB device at the back of the PC and connected the Hitachi Simple Drive there. I also allowed the Win 7 to correct the problems that it claimed were present on the Hitachi. I hadn't wanted to do this in case I lost my backups from the other PCs. But, hey ho, let's live a bit. Now the TI 2013 is doing backup on the Win 7 PC at an express rate. So I do not know why the USB at the back is better than the USB at the front, it is more difficult to find and I lose the other device. Or perhaps the 'cleaning' of the Hitachi external disk did the trick. If anybody has an explanation for front and back USBs then I'd be pleased to learn. I'll do a few experiments to try to sort out what was wrong. Thanks for your help.
Tony

Thanks for reporting back. I'm glad my suggestions fixed your problem.

Slow backup is generally caused by hardware or connection issues. Yet, it astonishes me how many forum posters refuse to do the checks we suggest, adamantly maintaining that their setup is fine.

Fixing the disk errors certainly helped your situation. True Image needs deep access to the system and to drives, and throughput with a backup is extreme, so disk errors can cause major hiccups. Checking for disk errors is low-risk, so everyone should do it when there are such issues. If no errors are found, at least that's confirmed by something more authoritative than user assumption.

I recommend a USB port on the rear of the case because usually it's directly connected to the USB card. Ports on the front or top of a desktop case are often connected via an internal cable, so are not as direct a connection. Your result, and that of many other users who followed that advice, are proof that it often makes a difference.

OK, I did make the mistake of changing two things before testing the result. One: I let Win7 loose on the Hitachi disk although the other systems had not complained about it. Two: I plugged into the USB at the back of the tower instead of the front. After decades of working on big IBM systems I should have known that one step at a time, testing each step as you go, is the best way to pinpoint a problem. I'll just have to accept the solution and maybe try the front USB next time. Is there a fix for the front USB problem? Get a new cable? After working on 'proper' computers for most of my working life I often quote myself "It's only a PC. It's not supposed to work." Thank you tuttle, you are my guru from now on.

Just to complete the scenario: I tried to back up on the Verbatim external disk in the front USB. The time was expanding from 4 hours to 5 hours so I killed that and plugged in to a rear USB and started again. As of now the estimated time is 45 minutes. My PC obviously has a problem with the USB ports at the front. Is this fixable? I'd rather fix it than trash it. It cost real money.
Regards, Tony

It may not be the hardware at all. See my comment above.
Try plugging the external drive back into the front and see if the times remain good. With Win7 I have to plug in the external drive after each boot, otherwise the backup is 3 days.

TonyDitt wrote:

Just to complete the scenario: I tried to back up on the Verbatim external disk in the front USB. The time was expanding from 4 hours to 5 hours so I killed that and plugged in to a rear USB and started again. As of now the estimated time is 45 minutes. My PC obviously has a problem with the USB ports at the front. Is this fixable? I'd rather fix it than trash it. It cost real money.
Regards, Tony

As I explained earlier, usually the rear ports are directly connected to the USB card so they offer the most solid connection with most consistent bandwidth. Ports on the front or top of a desktop case are often connected via an internal cable, so are not as direct a connection. Even if you changed the internal cable, the front ports still aren't as directly connected. I don't know if a different cable would improve things.