Restore Speed Incredibly Slow
After a hard disk crash, I am restoring some saved folders, but the restore process seems unusually slow.The original directory of about 85GB took a couple of hours to backup (to a NAS on the network), but the time estimate for copying the files (using explorer) back to a new hard drive is 15 hours. This doesn't make sense. Any ideas?
That 15 hours may not be accurate - take the reported time with a grain of salt. As the drive processes different types oif data, the time will change since it's only an estimate based on the current restore speeds. For instance, you may start out fast when restoring large files, but get bogged down with 4K transfer speeds when it hits the OS folders and application folders which will then increase the reported time as teh calculations are based off of the speeds at that time. When it gets past those and back to some larger files again, the reported time could come way down again.
Additionally, read/write times to and from the NAS will be different. What is your new hard drive compared to the old hard drive - If it's a spinning drive, reads will be faster (read from drive to NAS) compared to writes (write to drive from NAS). Other things can come into play such as how the new drive is connected (USB vs SATA connection), network speed at that time or performance of local system when writing compared to reading can also be a factor.
Typically, backup and restore time should be pretty similar as long as the disk type is similar and all the other variables are pretty much the same as well. Just using a different disk can be a huge variable, especially if you went from a small SSD to a large spinner or from a 7200rpm spinner to a larger 5400 rpm spinner, or if you used a direct SATA connection to take the backup, but are restoring to a USB connected drive.
We really can't say what's changed, so can only speculate without more details to help solve the mystery as there are a lot of variables that can come into play with backup or recovery in either direction. 85Gb to your NAS in a couple of hours seems slow to me. I backup a 250GB SSD to my NAS that has about 80GB data, compressed down to about 44GB of data in roughly 15 minutes. Resstore time takes about the same to the exact same SSD or a similar one connected to the same SATA port on the motherboard. If I restore to a USB connected 7200rpm spinning drive, that 15 minutes jumps to about 40, but still far less than a few hours so I'm guessing it is network latency, or you're using a 10/100 router/switch instead of a gigabit one, or you've changed the connection and/or even the drive type that is also contributing to the difference.
The new drive, to replace the old spinning boot drive, is a 480GB Sandisk SSD. So far, with other restore activities (non-Acronis) and the reinstallation of several software applications, there have been no problems or indications of slow performance. I have only experienced this with the attempt to copy the contents of the Acronis tib files from the NAS to the SSD. As soon as the current copy operation is completed, and that looks to be several hours, I will run chkdisk and report the results.
Keep us posted. Another thought... you're using the default Linux rescue media - curious if you are getting full Gb/s transfer speeds with your local NIC using the default Linux drivers which may only be giving you 10/100 speeds. You could also try building WinPE rescue media, making sure to supply current drivers for your NIC to see if that helps with performance. We have put together a WinPE MVP tool to help with building WinPE rescue media and help with driver injection (just put your drivers in teh correct folder before you run the tool) and it will add them at build. The caveat is that you need to have Windows ADK installed first to build WinPE rescue media - it's a fairly large install at 3.4Gb (when you pick the top 3 options - and you need to to build WinPE media) during the install. You get some really nice, customizable rescue media with additional driver support and we also provide the latest IRST drivers for RAID support and compatibility with newer NVME PCIE hard drives. Downloads for the Microsoft ADK and the MVP winpe tool are below if you're interested in checking it out at some point.
Thanks for your response and suggestions.
So far, the estimated completion time looks like it may not be far off. After about 4 hours, the progress bar is about 20%, and the contents of the directory that I am copying are all files of about the same size (about 2MB each) - they are audio files of instrument loops.
My estimate of the backup time for this folder was a best guess from memory -- it could have been less than two hours, maybe even less than an hour... i'm not sure at this point.
I'm copying the files from a Syntology Diskstartion NAS over a gigabit (wired) network to a newly installed Sandisk 480GB SSD. I have been installing software applications and restoring data files from other backup sources to this drive with no apparent performance problems. I noted, for example, that Windows 10 reinstalled quite quickly, compared to my past experience with Windows installs.
I had assumed that restoring the folder using Explorer and copy and paste would be slower than if I could have used Acronis, but this still seems inordinately slow.
I apologize for not providing more background information regarding my problem. Having managed a technical support organization in the past, I should know better...
The system I am restoring applications and data to is an HP Pavilion Elite 490t desktop running Windows 10 Pro, Intel Core i7-970 3.2GHz, with 24GB of memory. After the main boot drive (C:) crashed and was determined to be unreadable, I installed a 480GB SSD and reinstalled Windows 10 Pro.
The Acronis backup (folder, not image) files were stored on a Synology Diskstation 5-bay NAS, configured with Synology's proprietary RAID version. The NAS and the desktop are on a wired gigabit network.
Since the original Acronis backup description files were lost in the disk crash, I used Windows Explorer to copy and paste folders selected from the tib files on the NAS to the SSD. with the same parent folder names.
Ah, yes, file/folder restores can be much slower than a disk or partition resores work strictly at the block level and can restore chunks of data at a time - making them much quicker. A file/folder restore has to assess the level of information in each file/folder, set persmissions, etc. Hard drives in general will slow greatly when working with 4K data - this is the true performance of a hard drive as related to IOPS - not the synthetic benchmarks disk manufacturers advertise for the sequential large file transfers.
If you ever have the time or desire to put it to the test, do a simple copy/paste of one of those folders to a new test folder on the NAS and time it. Then do the same in reverse and copy it from the NAS to another test folder on the PC. To compare that speed to Acronis, then do a similar file/folder backup of the same folder to the NAS and likewise, do a recovery to another test folder on the PC. Theoretcially, the speeds with copy paste from Windows to the NAS and the backup from the computer to the NAS should be pretty close. Likewise, the restore from Acronis to the PC or the copy from the NAS to the PC should also be similar. They will all be much slower than a disk or parition backup or restore though since it's working at the file level and not at the block level.
Thanks - very interesting and makes perfect sense. I guess the lesson learned is to stick to partition level backup/restore actitivites, rather than operating at the folder and file level. In hindsight, the advantages in more granular control of backup content is outweighed by the convenience and speed of partition backups.
One other thing I tried; Suspecting that the slow restore might be related to the NAS or the network, I copied the tib file to a local hard disk (D drive) installed on the desktop. It took about five minutes to copy over. Performing a folder copy and paste from there to the new C drive yielded the same results: an estimated 15 hour restore time and very slow file transfer -- no apparent diifference from restoring from the NAS.
Even given the additional overhead involved in file/folder transfer, though, it still seems that the process shouldn't be as slow as it is, and I have to wonder whether there is something else going on here.
When the dust settles, I will do some more testing to see what I can find out. Thanks for the suggestions!
As another test with the .tib copied locally (large file so will be much faster to copy to and from the NAS), are you double clicking the .tib file to access it? If so, try right-clicking and use the Acronis >>> mount option instead. It should mount as a drive letter (like an attached usb device) and wonder if that might improve performance of the file/folder copy from within the backup archive.
I had ipreviously tried mounting the tib file by right-clicking, but received the message "Specified archive cannot be mounted since it conatins no partitions."
Ah, I forgt mounting is only possible on parition or disk backups.