Restoring large volumes from Cloud is completely broken, unable to pause/resume downloads

James, welcome to these user forums.

I would recommend opening a Support Case directly with Acronis Support for your Cloud Restore issue as you are raising questions here that we cannot answer from the user forum, as we have no access to details of how the Cloud works or to any of the systems that provide this service.

It is recommended to balance any Cloud backup strategy by having a local backup as well, so that you have more than one method of recovering in the fastest way.

The limitation on downloading via the web browser has been raised previously with Acronis and requests have been made for a FTP access method to the Cloud data, where this does support pause and resume functions.

I can only describe Acronis Cloud as being completely broken. None of the restore processes allow for pause/resume of the downloaded data. I have a 700gb volume to restore, which will easily take over 24 hours to download, and the power in this room gets switched off overnight. So I need a way to pause and resume the downloading of this data, and somehow Acronis have not thought to build this critical feature into the product.

It's not in the main app either, and also not a feature I've seen in other competing HOME backup products - if you know of one, let me know.  

Take the calculated time with a grain of salt.  Not only will it fluctuate based on download ISP speeds as those fluctuate, but also as different types of files/folders are being restored.  Large files (like single .iso's) go fast.  However, the same size folder that contains many nested folders and smaller files in each one will go much slower - this is not an Acronis issue, but disk issue (those Max read/write settings on your SSD are for large files.  The 4K settings are the speeds you will see with small files and will be much slower).  As the type of content changes during the restore, the speed of the recovery will fluctuate and there's no real way to calculate the total time as it is a mix of ISP speeds and file transfer speeds that will fluctuate througoutt the process. 

Regardless of your backup product, if you intend to restore data other than directly to the original source (which I would not recommend doing), you will always need the space to do that.  It is a wise practice to restore to a different location and not completely overwrite the original data - just in case.  In IT business, you never work with live or original data for restores, unless you have no choice.  If you want to a do a full restore, over the original data, that would be done as a disk or parition recovery, but I wouldnt' recommend it unless you have no other disk to work with and your data is less valuable to you than the cost of a spare disk to do such a recovery. 

I do agree that this could be improved, but also see these limitations in regular web downloads and web browsers.  I also don't know of any other web based backup solutions that provide this type of feature (pause/restart after a full download for backups either).  

Cloud should be your secondary/offisite backup - not your primary backup.  It is slow, but if there is a fire, disaster, etc, and your primary backups are unusable, then you have the offsite cloud backup to rely on.  A local backup to an external USB drive, a NAS or another internal backup will be oodles faster in both backup and recovery time, but the Cloud will be there as a backup to your backup.  

Please take a look at the IT standard for backups:  3-2-1 as that should be applied at home as well as in the industry.  You'll see this stressed on Acronis, VEAM, Backblaze, Carbonite and any other number of backup utilities because life happens and you never want to have just one backup of your critical data, and certainly not in just one location (you can have 20 backups at home, but if your house catches on fire and takes them all with it, what's the point?).

Does your download manager allow you go pause a regular download, turn off the pc and then resume that download?  In my experience, that is usually not the case for web browsers - it almost always starts over again since the browsing session has been completely ended and restarted.  You can test this theory by grabbing a microsfot .iso or some other large file and pausing the download.  Then reboot your PC and see if it picks up or not - my guess is that it will not start from where it left off and will start from scratch again. 

Okay while I agree with all of your points, none of them really justify why Acronis Cloud should be actually unusable. I paid for a backup and I expect to be able to restore it. "You should have additional backups" is a straw man, I haven't come here asking for advice on backup strategy, I've come here wondering why the hell THIS backup isn't working, and it's not broken through any failing of my own, it's broken through bad implemenation. The backup is there, but there's no way of downloading it. If I had known this backup would be this impossible to restore, I wouldn't have paid $100 to have it. Simple as that.

I do have more backups of this data, someone else has a drive with the same data on, and in a couple of weeks or so I can get hold of that drive. It's also about 4 months out of date, which isn't a terrible disaster (90% of the data is archive material) but not ideal. The point of having it in the cloud though, is to save me having to wait a couple of weeks to have a drive shipped to me. On my connection 700gb could be downloaded in a couple of days. The backup could already be restored and I could be finishing those projects. And what if this other backup gets damaged en route to me?

I'm not restoring over the original source - the original drive is click of death. I've bought a new drive, larger than the old one so if I were able to download the massive ZIP file then unzipping it wouldn't be a problem. However I have concerns about my 3tb drive which is also backed up, as if that fails I would need to buy TWO new drives in order to complete the restore through a ZIP file (one to download the ZIP to, and one to unzip it to). Fundamentally, it should be possible to pause recovery of a full backup, and/or be possible to recover individual files (or lists of files) directly through the software, without being redirected to a browser.

I used to use Livedrive, I moved away as the software was a bit weak, and I had security concerns. However, recovering a terabyte of data from that was no trouble whatsoever. I could set up a restore task, it would download each file consecutively, then I could interrupt it when needed, then start the restore task again telling it to skip existing files. Boom. Worked a treat. Connection was super fast. No problems recovering data whatsoever. I'm now of the opinion that Livedrive was brilliant, because it actually WORKED.

And yes, you're right, if you pause a download overnight on any download manager, then it will fail the next day. Which really puts a question mark on why the Acronis support team insist that I use a download manager in order to resume a download the next day, when even if their server supported resume (which it does not) this would still not work overnight.

And, yes, I have raised a support ticket, and all they say to me, over and over again, is "use a download manager that supports resume" even though THEIR SERVER doesn't support resume, and "leave your computer turned on for 48 hours" which is not an option. The dreadful support response is why I have come here.

I have found Clould works OK if you do a recovery, however trying to download files (indiviually or all at a particular date) is very flaky. Once the connection is lost, you have to start over, and connections to the cloud server seem to be unreliable when a download can take 24 hours or more. The speed is also an issue (I have never seen it fast that 5Mbps on my 100Mbps cable connection). No download manager I have tried overcomes the problem of the flaky connections.

The obouse solution would be for the zip file to be rendered on the Cloud servers, and a when this is competed, a download link is sent to the user. As it is the zip-file is being created as it downloads (or so it appears). This would explain the very slow download speed.

I suggest you make you concerns know to Acronis through the in-App feedback - start Acronis, and click on the ? icon on the bottom left-hand-side, and select "send feedback".

Ian

The interesting thing I found with Cloud when I tested previously with a restore was the full disk restore.  It is supposed to only apply the changes to the backup and not the entire thing.  On a new disk, it would be everthing though (of course).  However, technically, if that is the case, if it fails or starts again, it should pick up only where the changes still need to be applied.  The downside is that it has to scan the disk each time it starts again since it has to know what changes to apply, so that part could still take some time.  Perhaps, try an offline cloud restore to the new disk and put it to the test. Don't bog down on what the calculated time shows, you might find that it goes much faster when you pick up the next day again.

I don't get the download manager recommendation either.  If you're trying to recovery files/folders though, that might be why you're seeing the issue.  Have you tried a full disk recovery using the offline bootable media to start the process?

Disk recovery from Cloud

Recovery to a new location

When you recover a disk to a different location or to an unallocated space, the process is very similar to a recovery from a local storage. The only difference is in the data writing method. Acronis True Image downloads and writes data by separate blocks, and not continuously. This technology increases recovery speed and reliability of the entire process.

What if recovery has been interrupted

Since disk recovery from Acronis Cloud uses an Internet connection and usually takes a long time, the probability of the recovery interruption is higher comparing to recovery from an ordinary hard disk.

Possible reasons of recovery interruption:

• Internet connection has been lost.
• Connection to Acronis Cloud has been lost.
• You canceled the recovery, deliberately or accidentally.
• Electricity supply problem.

When recovery is not complete due to a connection problem, Acronis True Image automatically tries to reconnect to Acronis Cloud and resume the recovery process. It is recommended that you check your Internet connection settings in this case. If all the automatic attempts fail, run the recovery again manually when connection is restored.

In other cases please run recovery again manually and make sure the recovery is complete.

Regardless of an interruption reason, Acronis True Image does not start recovery from the very beginning. It resumes the process and downloads only the data that was not recovered.

I haven't been able to verify this with Full Disk Restore, but with Full Partition Restore I have confirmed that Acronis erases the partition and starts the restore from the beginning every time. When the restore is interrupted, the partition then becomes accessible in Windows, and you can see which files have been restored. So by starting and interrupting the restore a few times, I have been able to verify that it definitely erases the partition and starts again from the beginning every time, because this list of restored files is different every time. First time, I let it restore for about 20 minutes, interrupted and saw about 5 gigabytes of restored files on the disk. Started it again, interrupted after about 5 minutes, and saw about only 1gb of restored data, completely different files from the ones that were there previously.

Full Disk Restore does not leave the disk in an accessible state when interrupted, so I haven't been able to verify how that behaves. However I see no reason to assume it would behave differently.

When you say the disk is inaccessible during a disk restore, how so?  Could you not connect it to another machine and check the contents or does Windows tell you it needs to be formatted?  If you boot to WinPE (Acronis or otherwise), does the disk not show up or show nothing on it when you try to navigate it.  I will eventually get around to testing this on a VM again, but don't see why it would be inaccessible once it's been formatted and data has started to be written.  The partition may just need to be assigned a drive letter, or perhaps it hadn't gotten to the main drive yet - it could still be working on the hidden paritions (EFI, Windows Recovery, OEM recovery and hadn't gotten to the main OS parition yet). 

It's been awhile since I've had to do this, but I'm pretty sure the disk recovery did pick up where it left off when I initially tried this out a few months back.  The documentation only specifically states this for a disk recovery and not a parition option. I'm not sure why the limitation may exist for a partition recovery vs a disk recovery, but still worth trying it out and if it isn't working, needs to be addressed by Acronis, but they can't address it if it's not made known as an issue.