Recovering Partition Very Slow with TI 2011
I just built a new computer with Windows 7 Pro 64 bit and upgraded to TI 2011 from TI 2010 because the TI 2010 recovery disc couldn't see my hard drive. TI 2011 works just fine. I capture full disc images to a network attached storage drive. I have a 1 TB hdd with about 74 GB used. A full back up and verification takes about 90 minutes.
My issue is that a restore using the recovery disc (made from within the program) takes forever. I restored my c: partition and it took about 7 or 8 hours. The .tib files was 43 GB in size although the partition size is 930 GB including unused space. I did not restore the Windows reserved partition or the MBR, just the c: partition.
To try to reduce the restore time I decided to make my c: partition much smaller and make a new data partition. I restored my c: partition again, shrinking it down to 100 GB, with 74 GB used. This restore still took 7 or 8 hours. Ugh.
After rebooting I had a 100 GB partition (with 74 GB used) and an 830 GB unallocated space as expected which I turned into a data partition and moved my data over to it. I captured a full disc image of the new arrangement. The c: partition contains 41 GB and the d: partition contains 33 GB data. I restored just the c: partition again, thinking that at about 1/8 the previous size it should take 1/8 the time. Not so much. It was better but it still took just over 2 hours to restore. This is tolerable in my mind but I was thinking that 41 GB should restore in less than an hour, or less.
I do like to test things within Windows and frequently restore my c: partition back to a known good state. Certainly TI 2011 works great and the backups and restores always work perfectly and my system boots every time. I would just like to speed this up if possible.
It seems like TI 2011 wants to do a sector by sector restore every time. It takes 5 to 10 times longer to restore a partition than it did to back it up. That seems excessive.
Are there any ways to speed this up (keeping in mind that I will be using the network drive)? I haven't tried a restore from within Windows yet. Is that process any faster? Does that involve Windows drivers and code or is that still a Linux based approach. It just doesn't seem as tidy as doing it with the recovery disc.
Any thoughts for speeding this up are appreciated.
Thanks.
Well, I found a solution and thought I'd post it in case others might benefit. BartPE boot disc.
I made a WinPE 3 boot disc but I had no network access with it. Obviously the default drivers didn't work for my network adapter. I couldn't figure out how to easily add drivers to this iso so I moved onto to making a BartPE boot disc where adding network drivers is pretty straight forward.
I made the BartPE boot disc and the computer booted up and loaded network drivers no problem. I had access to all my drives and the network.
I restored my c: partition from my network drive, which had now grown to 50 GB (of a 102 GB partition), up from 41 GB, and the restore took 15 minutes. With the BartPE disc the restore transfer rate was about 3.3 GB/min while the Linux based boot disc made from within TI achieved 0.3 GB/min. So the BartPE option was more than 10 times faster. Sweet.
There was no mention this time of restoring sector by sector in the summary screen prior to hitting the proceed button.
Anyway, if anyone is experiencing very slow partition restores the BartPE boot disc may be an option for you.
Pat L, I have not tried a full disc restore yet.
Cheers.
Well, it turns out the restore speed is not related to BartPE or Linux boot disc.
I was following another thread (http://forum.acronis.com/forum/19969) where James Simmons provided some great instructions on how to include your own drivers in a WinPE boot disc. This worked great and as I stepped through a restore I got to the final screen and saw that this WinPE method wanted to do a sector by sector restore of my 102.8 GB C: partition. I went back to my BartPE boot disc, stepped through the restore and saw on the final screen that it also wanted to do a sector by sector restore. What?!
After trying a bunch of different things using all 3 boot discs I've discovered the following (note that I'm using full disc images made from within Windows using the same backup job - just accessing a different day's full backup - and restoring to its original partition) :
1. When selecting the partition to restore, sometimes TI automatically populates the destination partition, type, and free space; sometimes it does not. A backup I made on the 26th is auto populated, while one made on the 24th is not.
2. If I have to select my own destination, partition type, and free space before and after the partition I get a regular quick restore.
3. If TI automatically selects the destination, partition type, and free space before and after the partion and I don't change anything I get a quick restore.
4. If TI automatically selects the destination, partition type, and free space, and I change the free space before and after I get a sector by sector restore.
This all makes sense I guess except for an oddity I discovered with point #4. When restoring my C: partition TI selected the correct destination and partition type. The free space before was set to 0 KB (which is fine), the partition size was set to 102.8 GB (again, okay), but the free space after was set to 3.500 KB (that's a K not a G). I didn't want a tiny piece of unallocated space when the restore was done so I clicked on the link to change the defaults. When that screen popped up, the before and after free space values were set to 0 KB; the 3.5 KB space after magically changed to 0 on its own. I clicked okay and returned to the previous screen, and the before and after now read 0 KB each. But now the restore becomes a sector by sector restore.
Kind of odd behaviour. I haven't actually hit the go button yet on one of these restores (I've done so many this week) to see if I get a 3.5 KB piece of unallocated space but I presume I will.
Not sure what to do with this except that my next restore will likely end up with a small piece of unallocated space after my c: partition. No big deal.
Also, this behaviour is common to all three boot discs. It didn't matter whether it was Linux, WinPE, or BartPE.
There appear to be small tweaks one can make to a restore job that will make the difference between a regular restore and a sector by sector restore, possibly changing the time period by many hours. I've done restores both ways and they both work. The only difference is the time it takes.
I've benefited from many forum posts, tutorials, and the experience of others at this forum so I thought I'd take the time to pass on my experiences with doing partition restores. Maybe it will benefit someone else.
Cheers.
You got it.
Hey, if you restore, put a 1MB unallocated space before your first partition. This will make sure your disk is aligned. Not a big deal for non-SSD disk, but a big deal for those.