[ISSUE] compression on normal level seems to be partly inefficient

It could stille asily be CPU bottlenecked, for example the compression task might only be single threaded and only use 25% laod on a quad core processor. There are also other places itcoulkd be bottle knecked, like memory bandwidth or L1/L2 cache. I'd have a look at your task manager and see if all your cores are evenly loaded at 25% usage, or weather you have onew core fully loaded and rest doing pretty much nothing. If the late, then higher clocked CPU rather then one with more cores might help you.

Compresison is designed for having smaller saved backups (ie more backups ona  given size media), not for speeding up the backup process.

Aye Riley, I will have a look on that next time. I did not thought about that way of bottlenecking, just because when I use max compression even my 5.2 GHz CPU faces its limit and I think - not sure though - load is even on all 8 threads, but as said, I will have a look on the core loads rather the overall load.

I just want to back up my new computer. I have 98 gigs, and I've tried selecting enitre computer which actually selects everything attached including the backup drive (stupid) and I've tried Disk and Partitions deseleting the page in advanced settings that excludes files.  I keep getting a Image size from 14gigs to 16gigs. WTF?

ES, you may want to open your own thread for this as the issues you're facing are different than the OPs original post.  In your new post though, please include some screenshots of your settings and a "detail" view of your drives so we can see the size and used space on them as well.  Entire PC is designed to backup up everything - I pesonally don't use it for the same reason you've found.  Instead of Entire PC, hover over "entire pc" with you mouse when creating a new backup disk and select "disks and partitions" instead.  Then select the main box next to the drive you want and ensure all paritions below it have been selected as a result.  This will result in the entire drive being backed up and completely bootable in the event the image needs to be restored to a new or different disk down the road.   I can't say why you're only getting 14-16Gb output without more information on your existing drives (screenshots please) as well as what you've excluded.  Acronis uses compression by default, so can bee 15-30% less than the used space on your drive.  It also excludes things like pagefile.sys, hiberfile.sys and more that can take up a lot of space while Windows is in use, but are not necessary for the purpose of backup and recovery.  You can remove those exclusions if you want, but is recommended to leave them there.  I would, however, remove the exclusions for Chrome, Firefox, etc, if you value your browser favorites and settings.

I commented here because of unknown compression.

Using Acronis 2016 Win 7 pro

ES, your settings shown in the images look fine except for not having any exclusions at all - there is no need to swell the size of your backup image(s) by including the system pagefile.sys or hiberfil.sys which can be several GB in size each, plus you should exclude having any existing .TIB (backup image) files or else you would be making a backup of a backup...

From your drive image I can see that you show a used size of 93.6GB and I would expect a backup image size to be around 70GB approximately, certainly not as low as 14 - 16GB.  You may need to actually perform a backup to get an accurate backup file size as this is somewhat of a guess at this stage.  A lot will depend on what type of files form the bulk of the used space on your SSD drive within the 93.6GB space used - if you have a lot of files that can be highly compressed such as text documents, then the image size could be smaller, but if you have a lot of image files (.JPG etc) then this are already highly compressed and will be saved as almost 1:1 compression in the backup image.

ES,

Are you absolutely sure the entire backup shows complete with a total of 16Gb, or could it be splitting the backup into smaller sizes and one of them is 16Gb?  If there is a hiccup wthe the backup (drive tries to spin down, USB port cutting out, network packet loss, etc), it's not uncommon for Acronis to split the backup file into multiple backup .tib files for a single job.  I personally autosplit my backups into smaller chunks anyway because it seems to be more efficient when I backup across the network (if the network drops out for any reason, it may try to start from the last backup .tib created, but if you only have one, that could mean the beginning again).

If it is saying it is complete and the entire thing is only 16Gb that seems way off.  I would double check the .tib backup to see how big it really is by navigating to the destination backup drive via Windows explorer.  Is it really only 16Gb there or is it a bigger size, or are there multiblle .tibs for that backup that are closer to 60-90Gb when you add them up?

I would also recommend taking a full backup with the offlline bootable recovery media and comparing the file backup size between it and the one in Windows - they should at least be fairly close.  If the Windows backup with Acronis is truly only resulting in 16Gb, something is wrong.  You might try disabling Microsoft VSS and letting the Acronis Snapapi backup take over and see if it works more effectively.  If VSS is the issue, it could be something within the OS that is the problem - I've not had much faith in the Windows 10 upgrades and have fresh built all of my previously upgraded Win10 systems because of the numerous and various issues (not just Acronis related) that kept popping up after upgrading.  So far, clean building the OS has been much more stable and reliable for all 3 of my personal systems. Not sure what OS you currently have, what your Windows logs show in them, or if you've upgraded from other OS's in the past and/or upgraded from previous versions of Acronis either.

> You may need to actually perform a backup to get an accurate backup file size <

This is a new computer and a full backup is what I'm attempting to do. I dont care about excluding anything.

I want an exact image of my system before I move forward.

Ive tried 4 times with aproximately the same result.

Should be pretty staight forward, is Acronis 2016 not a reliable program? 

> Are you absolutely sure the entire backup shows complete with a total of 16Gb<

see attached pic of file properties. One file.

> Not sure what OS you currently have, what your Windows logs show in them, or if you've upgraded from other OS's in the past and/or upgraded from previous versions of Acronis either.<

Brand new system and install of Win 7pro

Downloaded and installed Acronis True Image 2016

If you only have the Win 7 OS and True Image installed then the 16.5GB file size is most likely correct.  You should try using Windows Explorer to open the backup file and explore the contents.  I think you will find everything that should be there is there.

This is just a shot in the dark, but how much memory is installed in this computer?  Windows 7 defaults will create a hiberfil.sys and pagefile.sys that are roughly equal to the installed memory in size.  Even if all of the exclusions are removed, no decent disk imaging program is going to waste resources backing up those files.  So if your computer has say 32 GB of memory then those files could be taking up as much as 64 GB of space on the system drive.  That would cut the important data on the system drive down to 34 GB, and a 16 GB archive would be reasonable.

Yes 32 gb  ram. 

64 Gb or 2/3 of my install and updates is relative to hibernating?

Thanks for insight.

I guess thats the explanation. Although after spending a long time with tech support they aren't familiar with your explanation which is disturbing.

Gigantic software backup company and I'm really the first one to experience this  -Seriously?

I've spent over 5 hours on this today.

Ridiculous.

ES, just use Windows Explorer (with hidden files and folders allowed) to check the sizes of your pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys files then you will know for certain if these are taking up as much space as suggested by Joey.

I can understand why the hibernation file would need to equal the size of installed memory, i.e. 32GB for you, but I would have concerns if the pagefile was that large as that tends to contradict the whole purpose of having a paging file which was intended for memory constrained systems to page data through a disk based file.  If you have 32GB of memory, you could disable the pagefile altogether unless you are using very high memory intensive applications such as CAD!

Sorry for the delay

Yes!

pagefile.sys is 31.9 GB

hiberfil.sys is  23.9 GB

So just to clarify, do I have a proper restorable system image without those files?

And as a as a side question, is this relative to having a SSD drive?

Thanks

ES, thank you for the details of the system files - they certainly do add significantly to your backup image size if included, another 56GB before any compression.  You do not need these files in order to have a valid restorable system backup image - both will get recreated immediately on the first boot of the system.  As a side note, Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 add a third system file to the mix, swapfile.sys that is also excluded by default and is not needed as will also be rebuilt on start.

Thanks for the info.

Thing is I unchecked the box that excludes these files in the settiings tab as referenced in a pic in a previous post.

The program seems to have decided not to include them on its own I guess.

Why have the exclusions tab if it doesnt function.

So much confusion for such a hopefully simple diagnosis...

ES, I understand that this is frustrating - I would hope that the answer here is that the software is intelligent enough to know that these often very large files are not needed and can be excluded regardless of what the Exclusions settings say - being more sceptical, I suspect that if you had previously had the Exclusions box ticked and then unticked it later, that the backup task script still remembered the exclusion!

The recommendation with these later versions of ATIH is not to alter the backup task configuration settings after you first create the task as it can have some unpredictable consequences - rather if you need to make changes, use the option to Clone the settings and create a new backup task based on those cloned settings.

The only method of proving this point would be to open the actual backup task script in a text editor and look at what is actually set - the file content is in XML format and you should look to see if you have lines like the following:

<common_options allow_multi_volume_snapshot="false" allow_reset_archive_bit="false" 
app_settings_backup="false" chassis="8" description="My Full backup" entire_pc="false" 
exclude_by_mask="true" exclude_hidden="false" exclude_system="false" 
execution_count="3" fast_incremental="true" ignore_encryption="false" 
increment_type="incremental" nonstop_backup="false" ocb="false" 
rotation_count="5" rotation_scheme="1" skip_security="false" smart_backup="false" 
take_screenshot="false" use_vss="true">
                    <file_mask pattern="hiberfil.sys" />
                    <file_mask pattern="pagefile.sys" />
                    <file_mask pattern="$Recycle.Bin" />
                    <file_mask pattern="swapfile.sys" />
                    <file_mask pattern="*.tib" />
                    <file_mask pattern="*.tib.metadata" />
                    <file_mask pattern="*.~" />
                    <file_mask pattern="*.tmp" />
                    <file_mask pattern="*.db3-journal" />

Hello ES,

If you still see these files in your backup archive, that must be because they were backed up previously and you have just made an incremental backup which adds a new recovery point, but does not delete anything from already made, previous recovery points.

Regards,

Slava