Backup process is incredibly slow
I apologize in advance if this issue has been addressed in another post. I just purchased ATHI 2012 Family Pack on June 18 for my wife and I. Her computer seems to be fine when backing up. Mine is a different story, I have ATHI set to do an Incremental Backup Every Sunday at 5pm (the backup size is about 250gb). The backup is being stored on a 2TB external hard drive via USB 2.0 cable. It has been taking over 9 hours to complete EACH backup, not just the initial backup. Please Help. Here are my system specs:
Dell XPS Laptop
16GB ram
(2) 500 GB hard drives
Windows 7 Ultimate x64
Things that can affect speed,
I susb port acting like USB 1 or 2
If ati finding a huge amount of changed/written-to sectors? this could be due to a defragger or a background backup program copying every change you make.
The backup settings aren't what yo wanted them to be--sometimes the settings don't stick when you edit backup settings.
Yo don't have enough incs allowed in the settings or don't allow enough files or space to be stored and as a rsult ati in consolidating (which in itself takes about as long as a full backup, every time you try to make an inc.
I don't have any defragger running or anything like that in the background. It just seems like 9-10+ hours means there is something going on, it should not be taking this long. I have read similiar problems with ATHI but they are all on older versions and the solution is to upgrade to newest version. But this solution does not help me. Should I completely uninstall and start fresh?
Doing a proper uninstall and fresh install wouldn't hurt and might fix. Do it this way
run msconfig.exe
On the Services tab, check box to hide all Microsoft services, then select Disable All. Then on the Startup tab, check Disable All, then reboot.
Now unistall ATI
run the ati cleaner
http://download.acronis.com/ATIH_CleanUp_2012.exe
then install ati
Lastly, when all done, then run msconfig.exe again and select normal startup on the first screen, then exit with reboot.
Thank you so much for your help. I will try this out when I get home and let you know what happens.
I have found that all kinds of whacky things can happen when installing or uninstalling without msconfig -- not always, not even most of the time, but it's so much easier to use it then have to wonder if something didn't install/uninstall right or if a driver had a conflict when installing, etc.
Thank you so much for your help. I will try this out when I get home and let you know what happens.
pls update what happened finally
my wife had dental surgery so i haven't tried it yet. will keep you updated.
*Update*
I finally had a chance to follow Scott Hieber's instructions and It worked like a charm. I guess I guess I just had a bad install. I ran an incremental backup after and it took just about 2.5 hours which is fine with me (compared to 9+ hours). Another bit of advice: I had to set up everything after new install and I noticed an option to set the process priority, I changed it from normal to high so I know that helped as well (not sure if this setting alone was problem to begin with).
glad things are workingh better for you.
You can see if the priority seting wasthe cause by setting it back to normal ow low. If you aren't running cpu intensive/disk intensive operations while the backup is being made, then the priority setting shouldn't matter much. but esy enough to test.
I don't have any defragger running or anything like that in the background.
please note: different to earlier versions, windows 7 will automatically run scheduled defrag tasks per default!
this needs to be considered in the context of ATIH.
regarding the backup performance: in the past i had obseved serious slowdown that i was able to eliminate by enabling backup splitting.
you sure don't want one single *.tib file 400 GB in size that itself is sitting in the file system in highly fragmented state.
just make it split to chunks of 20 GB and performance should improve ... ?
File fragmentation noticeably slowing down your pc is a myth. Just do the math and you'll see. Otoh. defragging itself can use up a lot of resources and cause a lot of disk thrashing.
i don't want to get "offtopic", here
1) we all know that defragmentation increases backup size and decreases performance of ATIH in case of differential or incremental backups. see http://kb.acronis.com/de/node/2712
that's why i said: on win7 we need to consider this impact in the context of ATIH.
2) regarding the usefullness of defragmentation: go figure why microsoft has introduced the default defrag in win7 - for no reason?
3) for my legacy system it was no myth at all:
i was using win xp with PATA HDD (i.e. no AHCI / NCQ).
ATIH was creating one single, giant *.tib file.
due to lack of NCQ the fragmented giant tib file extremely slowed down the entire procedure.
irrespective of the pros and cons of defragmentation:
i just wanted to recommend to enable backup splitting. this improved ATIH performance on my legacy system.