Image your system with free Macrium

kado897 · 02 Jan 2013

One hour is about right for 85GB if the backup device is USB2 attached.

whs · 02 Jan 2013

Keith, if I understood that right, they were imaging to an internal 5400RPM HDD. But 1 hour may still be right because of all the traffic on the Sata bus and the slow disks.

kado897 · 02 Jan 2013

You may be right Wolfgang. I don't have any experience of SATA to SATA internal drives. The USB2 drives I use are limited by the USB transfer rate.

0pTicaL · 02 Jan 2013

whs said:

Appr. 1 hour for 85GBs sounds a bit slow. But I cannot really tell. All my systems are on SSDs and I image to eSata or USB3 attached fast spinners. That takes less than 10 minutes for appr. 30GB (my data is on another partition).

But the time it takes to make an image should not really matter a lot because you can run it in the background and do other things in the meantime.

The recovery process took 2hrs 48mins. That is way too long.

alan10 said:

Not enough information.

Is 85 GB the size of the *.mrimg image backup file ?
How does that size compare with the Acronis *.tib image backup files ?
By "Recovery Process" do you mean you are using the Macrium Reflect WinPE Boot Rescue CD to RESTORE the system drive ?

N.B. Macrium and Acronis use different terminology,
but they have similar capabilities by different names.
The backup :-
can ignore free space with all its deleted files and is faster ;
OR it can include all Free space with all its deleted files and takes much longer.

– mrimg file is 58.4GB
– in Acronis I can choose compression ratio
– Yes, I am using the WinPE Rescue ISO burned to CD that whs was nice enough to share

Somehow I'm thinking I did not ignore free space and deleted files, but my mrimg file is only 58.4GB and with the WinPE recovery disc I did not notice any recovery options.

kado897 said:

You may be right Wolfgang. I don't have any experience of SATA to SATA internal drives. The USB2 drives I use are limited by the USB transfer rate.

kado897 said:

One hour is about right for 85GB if the backup device is USB2 attached.

Here's the funny thing, it was actually faster when I used a 1TB external USB 3.0 drive for recovery (took ~47mins) and the drive was connected to a USB 2.0 port because the laptop does not have USB 3.0 so transfer speed was limited by bus.

Don't know why SATA to SATA is slower, very weird…

kado897 · 02 Jan 2013

My C drive is around 90GB. It creates an image of around 40GB and takes about 55 minutes to a usb2 attached drive. I would guess that Wolfgang is correct about the cause of your slowness.

0pTicaL · 02 Jan 2013

kado897 said:

My C drive is around 90GB. It creates an image of around 40GB and takes about 55 minutes to a usb2 attached drive. I would guess that Wolfgang is correct about the cause of your slowness.

That's why I decided to copy the mrimg to my internal SATA drive, hoping the recovery time will be faster but it ended up taking almost 3hrs.

whs · 02 Jan 2013

The recovery process took 2hrs 48mins. That is way too long.

That is definitely too long. But if I read that right, that was not on the system you specified in your user profile. The slowest recovery I ever had on a modest laptop was about 30 minutes.

kado897 · 02 Jan 2013

Hmm. I wonder if there are problems with the disks.

alan10 · 02 Jan 2013

0pTicaL said:

Somehow I'm thinking I did not ignore free space and deleted files, but my mrimg file is only 58.4GB and with the WinPE recovery disc I did not notice any recovery options.

Here's the funny thing, it was actually faster when I used a 1TB external USB 3.0 drive for recovery (took ~47mins) and the drive was connected to a USB 2.0 port because the laptop does not have USB 3.0 so transfer speed was limited by bus.

Don't know why SATA to SATA is slower, very weird…

The free space and compression options are determined when you create the backup,
not when you restore.

The WinPE Recovery Disc however can create backups and may well allow options for the creation.

SATA to SATA is very fast for me.
My 55 GB SSD has 11.4 GB in use
Macrium produced 6.13 GB *.mrimg image backup in 244 Seconds on my secondary internal HDD
and even more amazing
it takes only 58 seconds to compare that 6.13 GB plus another 0.5 GB of a two subsequent differential files
with the 11.4 GB in the current SSD,
and produce a third differential of only 164 MB.

I find it suspicious that SATA to USB2 is faster than SATA to SATA.
N.B. Some USB3 drives claim to gracefully fall back to USB2 speed when on a USB2 port.
Some perhaps are less graceful and fall back to USB1.

I suggest to test SATA to SATA you copy a very large file from your system HDD to the backup HDD,
and measure with a stop watch - or a sundial

P.S.
It took about 3 minutes for the WinPE Rescue to read the 6.13 + 0.5 + 0.164 GB and restore my SSD.

0pTicaL · 02 Jan 2013

whs said:

That is definitely too long. But if I read that right, that was not on the system you specified in your user profile. The slowest recovery I ever had on a modest laptop was about 30 minutes.

Would it have anything to do with me deleting the volume beforehand? I wanted to test if the program works on a empty volume so I popped the Windows 7 install disc and deleted the volume before I performed a recovery.

Something I didn't mention, when I booted off the WinPE disc it asks me to load drivers, are there any drivers that need to be loaded before the recovery process?

kado897 said:

Hmm. I wonder if there are problems with the disks.

Could be a possibility.

I just imaged c: again to my secondary internal HDD and it took 22mins. Approx ~85GB and the resulting mrimg is 58.3GB.