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Laptop back takes HOURS

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I was trying to back up my daughter's laptop using True Image v11.

The laptop is a Dell Inspirion.

I booted from the boot CD.  It starts fine, asks what to back up, where, additional parameters, and then starts.

It's been running now for 1 ½ hours, and shows 9 days remaining.  It is a 220 gig drive, backing up to an external WD drive (750 gig.

What could be wrong here?  How do I fix this?

Regards,
Chuck Billow

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 How does it run from the Windows environment?

From your description it sounds like a Linux USB driver problem or your USB port has suddenly decided to work at USB1.1 speeds.

If your drive is attached via an external hub, try plugging it into the PC directly.

If TI runs much faster in Windows, then it definitely points to the Linux drivers being the problem, you will need to either contact Chat or raise a ticket with Acronis, giving them details of your motherboard and chipset and see if they can provide you with a specially built ISO for the laptop.

Charles Billow wrote:

I was trying to back up my daughter's laptop using True Image v11.

The laptop is a Dell Inspirion.

I booted from the boot CD.  It starts fine, asks what to back up, where, additional parameters, and then starts.

It's been running now for 1 ½ hours, and shows 9 days remaining.  It is a 220 gig drive, backing up to an external WD drive (750 gig.

What could be wrong here?  How do I fix this?

Regards,
Chuck Billow

The estimation is notoriously inaccurate but there are some things that can lead to very long backups.

 I am assuming the external drive is USB. Make sure it is USB 2 as USB 1.1 will take forever

The Boot CD is Linux based and hence the drivers are often not the most efficient especially for newish hardware. Acronis may be able to supply you with a disk image that has more up to date drivers. Try their Chat line to see if they can help. Make sure you have the latest version of AT 11 

I backup a 350g hard drive using a VISTAPE boot disk so it uses Windows drivers to an external USB 2 drive. It takes about two and half hours to backup and validate the image.

 

   

Guys, this dell laptoip is "new" -- never been backed up.  The same config but with another laptop (her old one) worked like a charm -- same boot disk etc.

Is it possible that something "new" in the Dell drivers could be conflicting?

Regards,
Chuck Billow

 

Charles Billow wrote:

Guys, this dell laptoip is "new" -- never been backed up.  The same config but with another laptop (her old one) worked like a charm -- same boot disk etc.

Is it possible that something "new" in the Dell drivers could be conflicting?

Regards,
Chuck Billow

 

I don't think so especially as you are running the backup from the CD- the Dell Windows is not operating.  I think the Linux from the older versison of TI is not working very well with the newer hardware in the Dell. 

IS it still backing up?

 

 

 

 

Tatou, you may be totally right.  I installed v11 on the machine and am trying the backup starting it from the hard drive instead of the CD...

It hasn't given me any time indicators yet, but the "slides" are at least showing up mow, so it SI different.

Do I need to make a restore CD from THAT machine to use on THAT machine, picking up the right dfrivers?

Regards,
Chuck

 

 

Chuck,

Are you using the latest build of TI 11 (8,101)?

The TI CD created using the program is independent of the computer. It won't include any different drivers because of being created on a different computer.

If TI, when booted from the CD, doesn't support the hardware (drives not found, really slow, etc.), you will need to contact Acronis Support and request a build that includes the necessary drivers. Another option is to try the TI 2009 trial version and see if it works better. The trial version from the CD will do restores. TI 2009 can also restore TI 11 images.

Right now it appears to be (successfully?) performing a backup after installing TI, rather than running it from the CD.

Yet it makes me uneasy, in that if Windows is running, it can't possible be backing up everything for a full image, can it?

I'm doing this because I was having trouble installing Dragon Speaking on the laptop, so I was going to go to a clean system install to see if I could determine what exactly is causing the problem,.  Dragon installed fine on my Dell desktop, but refuses to do so on the laptop -- and Nuance (creators) as yet can find nothing to help..  Will the image I'm creating properly restore the entire system?

Chuck

 

 

TI works  by scanning the sectors on a partition, computing some sort of checkwords and then copies a portion of the image into RAM - it then plonks that portion or part thereof onto the backup drive, it then rechecks the sector portion  to see if any alterations have occured whilst it was working, if they have it then adds those to the image, it then goes onto the next portion of disk, so on and so forth.

This is one reason why TI is very picky about the quality of RAM in a system.

How it gets around the Windows  locks I don't know, if it didn't use Windows API's then ignoring the Windows locks would be easy. It is possible that it gives itself NTUSER authority as this is the authority Windows grants itself. 

The upshot is that apart from the Hibernation file and Pagefile TI can get all th edisk information it wants. In fact think of a defragmentation program that can move all the file chains about (some can even move the MFT and NTFS bitmap files), the difference being it doesn't move the disk information about it just copies it into a container.

It is true though that Windows could have a hissy fit or the processor locks aren't removed as and when (Windows does this bit) needed causing other programms running to fail. So from that point of view running an imaging session from outside Windows especially in Linux or OS2 or any non MS program is going to be one step nearer 100% no faults. Naturally 100% no faults doesn't exist.

 

Logically thinking about it, Acronis, Symantec, O&O Software and others would have gone out of business if the program couldn't restore a complete Windows system, and I have seen no posts here saying that TI forgot half an install. The main problems that are seen here is that TI is unable to begin a restore normally due to the Linux drivers or the image has been corrupted (that can be tested by validating the image) actually, or due to the manual being confusing in places or the user forgetting that reading a manual is a good idea often plonks the wrong button and everything goes haywire from there.

Having said all that,  a restore is always done in the Linux environment unless you've made a BartPE or VistaPE CD and in your case if  making an image using the CD is taking a few hours or so, then a restore is going to be almost double that, so you'll need to talk to Acronis about a special ISO for the new laptop or make a BartPE or VistaPE rescue CD which will use Windows drivers and will give you a Windows speed on restore.

The fact that the latop is the same model as the old one doesn't neccessarily mean that Dell have used the same components and drivers. In fact it is more than probable that the drivers have been updated in the intervening period betwen the purchasing of the two machines.

Colin:

Informative and depressing. 

I just wish I could figure out what the bug in the laptop is with the software I'm trying to install, for at least then all I'd need worry about is the backup from a time standpoint).

Regards,
Chuck

 Chuck,

 

if it is a driver problem due to a different version or build, that can be checked by going to the Dell website and looking up support for your model and see if any new drivers or BIOS packages etc are posted there.

 

My laptop is an IBM, so I rarely visit the Dell site, but I'm sure they have something similar to IBM and HP support downloads.

I am also experiencing totally unacceptable times for ATI Home 2009, build 9796, for various backups.

As an example, I have just installed a WD World Edition 1TB drive and set up a share to store my image backups.  The computer I am backing up is an old Dell Dimension 8100.  The computer and the WDWE drive are connected to an ethernet router, so there are no USB cables or issues involved.   I started an image file this AM at 12:47.  The partitions were finally saved at 7:00 AM for a run time of 6 hours and 13 minutes or 33180 seconds.  The size of the image is 27,765 MB, which means the average data transfer rate was about 0.83 MB/sec.  It certainly doesn't seem that the network connection was the limitation in that it is 100 mb/sec or 12.5 MB/sec and I have seen the connection out of this computer running at at least 50% - 60% of that maximum.  It appeared that the LAN was running about 10 - 12% of capacity during the backup and 50 - 52% during the validation.

The validation on that image took 1 hour and 19 minutes.

Immediately after the first run was done (set up as an incremental, but would have been a full backup since it was the first run) I went ahead and ran an incremental.  There were no system modifications during the original backup and virus scans, etc. were disabled.  I guess I was expecting that the incremental would run very fast - a matter of minutes, or maybe an hour at most.  Boy was I surprised!!!  The incremental image size is reported as 472.1 MB.  Creating the incremental took 4 hours 29 minutes and the validation took 1 hour 13 minutes.

So - one thing is clear, if you do a validation of every incremental, it appears that ATI Home 2009 actually validates the full image + incremental.  This was a surprise to me, but maybe only because I hadn't thought it through.

More importantly, the time to create the original image and the time to create the first incremental were both much, much longer than I would have anticipated.