Acronis True Image Home 11 Network Backup Is Slow

Greetings!

I support a small LAN with 7 Windows 7 64-bit desktops for a local charity.

All the desktops have Acronis True Image Home 11 (ATI11) installed and are configures as a HomeGroup.

I have been doing an incremental image backup over the network using ATI11 to one of the desktops but lately speed of the backups has become unacceptable.

For a specific example, Two of the desktops are Core I7 machines with GBit network interfaces connected through a GBit switch.

a) If I backup one to the other using ATI11 the backup will take 4-6 hours with network utilization at 3-5%.

b) If I backup the SAME system to its secondary HDD using ATI11 (a local backup) the backup takes about 2 hours.

c) If I then use a simple COPY command to copy the large ATI11 TIB backup file (30-50GB) from the SAME system to the SAME target system the network utilization varies from 25%-60% and the copy takes a, relatively speaking, small amount of time.

Note I get the same results for source systems which only have a 100MB network card except that during the COPY test they use 80-90% of the available network speed.

I searched the internet and found some suggestions involving changing the network cards settings, IPV4 Checksum Offload for example. I tried that and it immediately "broke" the HomeGroup network connection.

Question: Why will ATI11 not use more of the available network speed? Neither the source system nor the target system is CPU bound during the ATI11 backup, network or local. Aside from Norton Antivirus there are no other non-MS apps running. Disk Queue Length is not excessive.

Any ideas?

TIA!

It may be better to create an Acronis TrueImage Boot Disk and try and check if the incremental image back-up process has speeded up.

Incidentally how many GBs is the data that is being backed and after it is backed up is it being verified?

wanchoo said:

It may be better to create an Acronis TrueImage Boot Disk and try and check if the incremental image back-up process has speeded up.

Incidentally how many GBs is the data that is being backed and after it is backed up is it being verified?

Doing a network backup with a boot disk in Windows 7.... I will try when I get a chance this week.

Size does not matter, 15GB - 50GB depending on which system it is, I just used the 2 gbit networked systems as examples.

Yes the images are being verified but the network is slow during the actual backup and the verify pass.

Also it does not matter whether the backup is a FULL or INCREMENTAL backup (an incremental defaults to full if no initial full image exists anyway)

Well I did a little more testing.

First - all 6 office PCs now have Gbit network connections and are linked through an 8 port Gbit switch for local traffic.

I did a test doing an Acronis Backup and verifiy operation of ONE PC to another PC which serves as storage (it is used as a desktop as well). The Network Utilization in Task Manager varied from 40%-60% of the Link Speed of 1Gbit. The backup went QUICKLY.

I then did a test with TWO PCs doing an Acronis Backup simultaneously to the SAME PC serving as storage. The Network Utilization in Task Manager dropped to ~4%-6% of the Link Speed of 1GB.

I can understand the transfer speeds dropping when more than one backup is occuring simultaneously. But decreasing to 10% of a single backup occuring?

What am I missing here? The choke point would be the target storage PC but dropping to 10% when more than one backup is occuring? Is there a configuration setting that needs to be adjusted? Any advise would be appreciated.

This is not Win7 but may work the same.

I have two Win XP PCs linked via a wired ethernet 100Mb/s router. I suddenly found that one of the PCs could not access file shares on the other, getting the message 'Not enough server space....'.

I had also found that ATI 9 was suddenly very slow to backup across the network.

I applied the solution found here:

How to fix "Not enough server storage is available to process this command"

to correct the network file access problem. I applied this to the sharing PC first and it worked perfectly.

I wondered if this was related to the Acronis slow network backup problem and applied the same correction to the other PC.

Bingo, problem solved.

This may also be interesting:

http://winhlp.com/node/40

After being an ATI user since version 7 I am in the process of switching to Macrium Reflect.

It is not that ATI is a bad product but that the standard ATI response to non-critical problems is to "buy an upgrade" rather than provide any solution. This is true even when that problem did not exist for a time and then suddenly appeared. The problem with such a "solution", aside from unnecessary cost, is that there is no guarantee the new version will fix the problem and the new version will, in all likelihood, introduce a new set of problems.

So... I am switching to Macrium Reflect and will try that for a while. Thus far testing look good.

Good luck to all. Keep your backups current! The moment you do not..... oops....!