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Some Time Measurements on my particular PC for Full Backup Jobs of ATI Home 2010

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I was interested to have an idea on how long my typical ATI Backup Jobs will run on my new PC. I also noticed that some other ATI users are interested in having an idea, about the expected time of ATI Backup jobs.
I therefore decided to describe in this Thread how long my Initial Full Backup Jobs are running  on my particular PC.
 
Notice, that the performance of Backup Jobs depends on one's particular PC environment.
The times that I have measured on my PC will therefore not be the same as the times, that you will observe on your PC. But, since I have not found ATI performance measurements, I think that some ATI users might think "better to have available a description of these non-professional performance measurements than no measurement descriptions  at all".
 
These are the most important backups on my PC:
1.       Weekly Backup of the C Partition of my first internal Disk Incremental.
Size of a compressed ATI Full Backup File: approximately 15 GB.
2.       Weekly Backup of my data files located on the H partition of my first internal Disk.
Size of a compressed ATI Full Backup File: approximately 6 GB .
3.       Weekly Backup of my large number of Photos located on the second internal Disk of my PC
Current size of an ATI Full Backup File: approximately 115 GB.
 I expect that over the years, the total size of my Photo Files will increase substantially.
 
I will perform these backups weekly on a large 2TB internal disk, that is more or less reserved for my Backups. In addition, I also backup the same data less frequently (approximately every month or every two months) on large external Disks (attached via USB 2.0), that I store safely and remotely in the Safe of my Bank.
As we will see: when writing these backups on an internal disk, the backups run substantially faster than when writing the backup on an external USB 2.0 disk. Therefore, when I will eventually buy new and larger external disks for my backup files, I will consider to buy disks that I can connect via faster eSATA attachments (or perhaps instead via USB 3 attachments, if/when ATI will support USB 3).
 
Under the assumption, that I will not encounter too many ATI problems with it, I intend to use the incremental Backup Method for all of these backups.

The timings that I report below are for the initial Full-Backups (not for the much shorter Incremental backup runs).

 
A detail:
 I also perform a dayli backup of the folders used for my "active" projects. The total size of these folders is not large and the Backup does not take long; I therefore felt, that It is not worth to measure and report  the timing for this kind of "small and fast" Backups.
 


Overview of my measurements
 
Description of Backup
Backup Options
Size of Backup File
Time of Backup-Phase
Time of Verification Phase
#1) Partition Backup of "C:" to an external USB 2.0 disk
"Normal" Compression + "AES 128" Encryption
15.5 GB
11 minutes
11 minutes
#2) Partition Backup of "C:" to an internal disk
"Normal" Compression + "AES 128 Encryption"
15.5 GB
Not measured
Not measured
#3) Same as above
"Normal" Compression
No Encryption
15.5 GB
4 minutes
3 minutes
#4) Same as above
No Compression
No Encryption
27.6 GB
6 minutes
5 minutes
 
 
 
 
 
#5) File Backup of my Photo Files to external USB 2.0 disk
No Compression
No Encryption
115 GB
77 minutes
67 minutes
#6) File Backup of my  Photo  Files to an internal  disk
No Compression
No Encryption
115 GB
28 minutes
27 minutes
#7) Disk Backup of F Disk containing my Photo Files to an internal disk.
No Compression
No Encryption
121 GB
29 minutes
28 minutes
 
 
 
 
 
#8) File Backup of "My Documents" to an external USB 2.0 disk
"Normal Compression"
"AES 128" Encryption
6 GB
7 minutes
3 minutes
 
A detail:  I learned, that I should not pay any attention to the time estimates, that ATI provides for the remaining time of a Backup-Job.  I was often seeing an estimate that was much higher than the time it took to complete the Backup Job. I have often seen for some of the above Jobs estimates of 18 Hours. One time, I have even seen an estimate of 49'710 days!
 
My Observations
1)       Backing Up to an internal disk was much faster than backing up to an external Disk attached via USB 2.0.
  • Compare run #1 (where I Was backing to an external USB 2.0 Disk) with runs  #3 and #4 (where I was backing up to an internal disk)
  • Compare also run #5 (where I was backing-up to an external USB 2.0 Disk) with runs #6 and #7 (where I was backing up to an internal disk)
 
2)       In my particular environment and in these particular tests, performing a File Backup of all my Photo Files (a total file size of around 115 GB)) located on my F disk was ***not*** slower than performing a Disk Backup of my F Disk (around 121 GB).
  • Compare run #6 with run #7
This surprised me, because I was thinking that a Disk Backup was substantially faster than a backup of most Files contained on that disk.
3)       In my particular environment (I have a relatively fast Intel i7 950/3060 processor),  performing a Backup with the ATI "Normal" compression was faster than performing the same Backup without compression.
  • Compare run #3 with run #4.
This surprised me and can probably be explained as follows: with a fast processor, the additional time required to perform the compression is more than offset by the time-reduction achieved by writing less data (it is compressed!) to the backup-disk. I noticed, that when using ATI-provided compression all my 8 Windows 7 threads were being exploited for the ATI backup job.

I do not know whether use of compression with much slower processors result in slower or faster Backups.

Notice that for the backup of my Photo Files, I did not use any compression for the Backup (because most of my photo files are in a compressed .jpg format and can not be compressed further by a Backup-Process).

4)       Even if I do not show results of time measurements: use of an ATI-provided compression resulted in a substantially faster Backup than use of the standard Windows Folder-Compression (for the folder containing the Backup file). Use of standard Windows Folder-Compression resulted in a Backup Job which took longer than a Backup Job without compression; also the Backup-File was larger with Windows Folder-Compression than with ATI-provided compression. ATI seems to provide quite a good and efficient compression.
  
5)       When backing up to my internal disk, I was more than happy with the Performance of the Backup Jobs of ATI Home 2010 (around 28 minutes for 115 GB).

According to what I read on the Internet, I have the impression that ATI belongs to the category of the faster Backup products. For me, ATI is fast enough.

Notice however, that I am deeply concerned about the effect of running a disk defragmentation on the disk-space requirements (and on the performance) of  ATI Home Incremental Backups.  I believe to understand, that some of the other Backup software do not have similar problems for incremental File Backups performed after a disk defragmentation. I believe, that Acronis should fix this problem; at least by providing an option for those users who depend (because of disk-space requirements) on creating small Incremental Backup Files. Without a solution, the ATI incremental backup option is unfortunately often not much worth.

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Description of my PC
 
Since Performance measurements of Backup-Jobs depend on the PC configuration, I provide below a description of my PC Environment:
 
·         Windows 7, Ultimate, 64 bit (German language Version)
·         Acronis True Image Home 2010 (German Language Version), Build 6'053

·         Intel Quad Core i7 CPU 950 @ 3.07 GHz
·         12 GB of RAM

·         First internal Disk: a relatively fast Western Digital VelociRaptor of 300 GB with 10'000 rpm
o   C: Partition (approximately 47.3 GB of the C partition are used)
o   H: Partition containing among other "My Documents"
·         Second internal Disk: Western Digital Caviar Green of 2 TB with 5'400 rpm
This is a large but not one of the fastest Disks; but I believe that it is OK for my purposes.
This internal Disk is more or less reserved for my photo-files …I expect that the total size of my photo files will increase substantially.
·         Third Internal Disk: Western Digital Caviar Green of 2 TB with 5'400 rpm.
This is a large but not one of the fastest Disks; but I believe that it is OK for my purposes.
This internal Disk is more or less reserved for my Backup Files.
 
·         External Disk attached via USB 2.0: a "Iomega Prestige" "Desktop Hard Drive" of 1.5 TB that I bought around one year ago.
I could not find its rpm figure. The Iiomega Website just tells 480 Mbit/sec (as theoretical maximal transfer rate).

Thanks for the time to post this. It's interesting to see the relative performance of the different methods...and good observations on your part.

Hello Robert and Groucho,

Let me comment this situation.

First of all, I would like to thank Robert for such deep investigation, it's very useful!

Generally, the product behavior is normal in most cases you described. And I found it's very useful for approximate backup time calculation, so I will send this information to the responsible person, probably we will publish it on our common resources.

Once again, thank you for your cooperation!

Best regards,

Robert,
Nice presentation. In addition to your testing time, getting the information ready for posting also took a lot of time and effort. Very nice and useful.

I haven't bench tested restores, but in the course of my job I've made plenty of images and restorations. Off hand it seems like it takes 2/3 the time to restore as it does to image, via a USB 2 link someplace in the chain.

Also, for all the USB 2 tests, the latest build of TI 2010 supports USB 3, but Acronis won't admit to it as it doesn't "officially" support it yet. Backup on my machine is about 2x faster on USB 3 than it is on USB 2 even though the USB 3 standard with a SATA 300 drive is roughly 6x faster. The reason I get only a 2x speed increase is because of CPU power. When writing to USB 2 the system is waiting on the USB channel, when writing to USB 3 the wait is on the CPU.

Opa

Thank You very much for your sharing your experience.

Myself have not done any test with USB 3. Also, I am not a PC specialist and therefore this feedback is not the feedback of a reliable specialist. But ...it surprised me, that your backup via USB 3 was not as fast as a backup via a SATA-attached disk. Is this because (as you write) USB 3 is not yet officially supported?

Myself did recently a backup test (with Windows backup - not with ATI) with an eSATA attached external disk drive, and (as expected) it was as fast as a backup to an internal SATA-attached disk. As a non-specialist, I was therefore somehow expecting/hoping that a backup to a USB3-attached disk would also be approximately as fast as a backup to an internal disk.

Sorry to ask this dumb question: In your case, was your external disk officially supporting USB 3 and was it attached through a USB 3 port?

Also, I read somewhere (without knowing whether this information was reliable), that USB 3 is not yet supported by Windows 7. Does somebody know someting about this?

Robert,

This is getting a little off track but I'm game. I did some speed measurements with 4 files totaling about 4 gig. Also, my PC has two hardware boot modes, in one the system drive is an ATA 100, flip a switch and I boot with a RAID 0 made with two SATA 300 drives. The files transfer to / from USB 2 <> ATA in about 4 minutes either way. Switch to USB 3 and the transfer is about 2-1/4 minutes either way. Reboot with the RAID running and try the test again, RAID <> USB 2 remains about 4 min while <> USB 3 drops to 45 seconds. This is about the 6x speed increase over the 4 min of USB 2 and suggests the transfer to the USB 3 device is saturating the SATA 300 transfer speed (3 gig/sec vs 5 gig rating of USB 3). The enclosure I have is capable of the full 5 Gig speed, so when the SATA 600 drives become common place I can get the full speed benefit of USB 3.

Yes, it is connected to a USB 3 card or USB 2 depending on my specific needs. Speed with Acronis has a lot to do with drivers, media, source drive (SATA / PATA) type of data being saved (jpg files are already compressed, most data is not), the compression level chosen in the backup method and a few other issues. Backing up my RAID C: drive (15 gig) to the RAID D: drive takes about 3 minuets, to the USB 3/SATA 300 external drive takes about 4 min. Same to USB 2 drive is about 10 minutes. Restoration from the RAID is around 2:40. I usually use "Normal" compression and no file splitting.

No operating system (ie: Win 7) supports USB 3 in native mode yet as the standard is too new. Also, Windows support usually comes from hardware manufactures giving or licensing their drivers to MS for inclusion in a Windows release. Hence if you get a PCI-E / USB 3 interface card the drivers come with it. If you get one of the new mother boards with USB 3 on board, the system drivers will come with it. In either of those situations they will run in Win 7. I'm using XP Pro SP3.

Opa, Thanks a lot for your descriptions!