validating backups takes all memory available on the PC

Greetings stefan stanescu,

Thank you for joining us here on our Forum. I appreciate your time and efforts to post.

We apologise for any inconvenience on your part as a result of the issue you have been experiencing. I will be very glad to be of assistance, and provide you with the appropriate solution to your issue.

Just to confirm, you mentioned that your validation tasks would consume the majority of your system memory resources, despite the relative ease with which your backup tasks are carried out. As expected, your system becomes unresponsive throughout the validation task operation due to excessive memory consumption. Please correct me if I'm wrong up till now.

From the information you have provided, the most probable reason as to why your validation tasks are consuming excessively high memory resources is that your backup archive is too large for your system memory to deliver resources needed to perform the validation task.

As a simple overview of the difference between backup operations and validation processes, backup tasks are performed in a sequential write procedure, whereas validation tasks are carried out in a random access procedure. Sequential write operations are much faster than random access checksum operations, and the larger the backup archive that is being validated the more memory resources are consumed in the process of validation. You may manually check to see the sequential read/write speeds and random access speeds to mark the difference in procedures by downloading this third-party HDD benchmark tool.

Please see this Knowledge Base article that touches on the issue of backing up large volumes and, more specifically, validating these large volume backup archives. As a recommendation, you may try increasing your memory pool size as described in the Microsoft TechNet article.

The above information and suggestions apply only to large volume/partition backups, so could you kindly confirm whether or not you are backing up a volume as large as 700 GB simply to further understand the nature of your issue.

Please let me know of any updates or questions you have regarding the above stated details and suggestions, and I will resume with my investigation of the root cause of the matter.

Kind regards,

Volkan

Ist ein Intel i7 2600 eingebaut?

Schon mal ein Backup ohne validieren versucht und danach das Image manuell validieren? Ist der Speicherverbrauch jetzt besser?

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Is an Intel i7 2600 in your case?

Have you ever tried to perform a backup without validation and then validate the image manually? If the memory usage better now?

Hallo,
i7 2600k indeed.
Tried backing up and then, separately validating the result. Same catastrophy: backup in a matter of minutes, validation in hour(s). Backup with reasonable memory load, validation up to the max of RAM installed.

Für mich ist der Speicherverbrauch besser wenn das Image manuell validiert wird.

Ist die Zeit die für das validieren benötigt wird immer gleich, oder dauert es jedes mal länger?

Wird die Acronis Securezone verwendet?

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For me, the memory usage better if the image is validated manually.

If time is needed to validate the always the same, or it takes longer each time?

If you use the Acronis Secure Zone?

no acronis secure zone. Plain incremental backups (quite a few snapshots though, a month worth)
if plain validation memory is eaten up as in the case of a full pbackup and validation, See snapshot, eats all memory.
Time it takes: couple of hours (far too long for my taste i'd say) compared to the backup lasting for a reasonable couple of minutes each.

Hello stefan stanescu,

Thank you for your follow-up posts, I will be glad to address your continuing issues with your validation tasks.

Please kindly bear in mind that the backup tasks you have running are incremental in nature, and as you have stated that the backups complete within a matter of minutes, this is the result of the backing up of only those files that have changed since the last incremental backup task you had performed. Please see this Web-Help guide for more information on the various backup methods and versions, and specifically on how incremental backup works.

The validation task set to run after your incremental backup task, or manually run as you have tried already, performs a validation not only of the most recent incremental backup created, but also of the whole chain of incremental backups along with the initial full backup created up until the present. Please also see the information provided in this section of our Web-Help guide on how validation works, and the differences in validating a single full backup, differential backups, or incremental backups.

You may manually run your validation tasks by heading to the directory with your incremental backups are located, by right-clicking on the incremental backup, highlighting Archive from the selection, and choosing Validate. This will ensure that your specified incremental backup archive will be validated only, and not your whole chain of full backups and incremental backups since the last month. Please see this Knowledge Base article for a step-by-step guide on how to perform this with screeshots to assist you.

Please notify me if your validation task persists in consuming memory resources, rendering your system unresponsive.

Let me know if you do have any additional questions or further issues that I may be of help with.

Kind regards,

Volkan

thanks for your reply.
1. However i still wonder why the memory usage is up to the max under windows 7 64 while still being kept most resonable under XP. This is really a showstopper, not only it takes quite a while but the pc is stuck at 100% mem all this time!
2. There is also the issue of validation as separate task against validation after the backup is complete. I would expect the latter to validate just the most recent backup and your explanation to hold true when validating separately.