Much slower backup in Acronis 2021?

Christopher, different backup file formats and methods are used between the two backups you are comparing here.

Disk backups now use .tibx file formats and run under the backup_worker task.

File backups continue to use .tib file formats and run under the ti_demon task.

If you are unhappy with the performance of backups in ATI 2021 then I would suggest submitting Feedback direct to Acronis about this, or else open a Support Case for this issue.

Speed at which a backup runs is dependent on may factors.  Type of backup is one of these factors.  Comparison of full disk backups to file/folder backups is not meaningful as they are not performed in like manners.  This means they are an apples to oranges comparison.

Disk backups are performed at what is know as the block level to wit entire blocks of data are read and written.  File/folder backups are performed at the bit level or portions of blocks.

I see that you are backing up 2 disks at one time with a single backup task.  Personally I do not do that and do not recommend it.  It complicates the recovery process as generally only one disk would need to be recovered at any given time.  Therefore making backups of each disk independently is my preferred choice.  I believe that this method also increases the speed at which backups perform in a positive manner.

Enchantech wrote:

I see that you are backing up 2 disks at one time with a single backup task.  Personally I do not do that and do not recommend it.  It complicates the recovery process as generally only one disk would need to be recovered at any given time.  Therefore making backups of each disk independently is my preferred choice.  I believe that this method also increases the speed at which backups perform in a positive manner.

Separate backup tasks for different disks is the approach I have always taken; on data disks with multiple partitions I do separate backup of each. This allows me to tailor the frequency of the backup to reflect how often the content changes. For system disk I supplement disk level backups with a series of files+folders backups, the frequency depending on the importance of the content and how often it changes.

Ian

Ditto here for splitting backups to have separate tasks per disk, and for some partitions too where they store specific data types, i.e. music, etc.

ATI 2021 is taking 4 days! to backup 20GB. This is ridiculous! Is there any way to speed this up? A check of Task Manager shows most of the disc activity is from Acronis Cyber Protect Service.

Donald, welcome to these public User Forums.

There is no reason a 20GB backup should be taking anything more than an hour at most unless you are back in the stone age with a dial-up modem connection to the destination!

My first suggestion would be to Pause Protection using the option shown at the bottom left of the Protection panel in the ATI 2021 GUI - pause for an hour or more and see if the backup gets an increase in speed?

If pausing protection makes a difference, then you need to look at what is happening in the Protection panels and if needed to setup exclusions for the data involved in your backup source.

I agree with Steve; pause the Protection. This is a known (major) bug in the release versions of ATI 2021. The Acronis engineers have been working on for some time (since I first reported the problem). My understanding (an as always I could be wrong) is that is should be fixed (with a lot of other Protection related issues) in the next build.

They have a very good idea of what is going on - they saw it during a TeamViewer session - there was a lot of activity doing virus scan (maxing out read on the relevant disk) and slowing backup to a crawl. For some reason it was scanning the *.tibx files that was part of the backup being run. No idea why it would be necessary to scan either *.tibx or *.tib files as nasty files cannot be deleted from them.

Ian 

I have the same issue, I 'UPGRADED' to 2021 from 2019 and as a software developer would expect the upgrade it inherit settings and my backups are well over 50% slower and takes 3 times longer to start (20 mins in some cases) the backup now.

I have used Acronis for years and know about exclusions etc.

2019 version would backup 1300GB in 1h 20mins now it takes over 3.4 hours (after upgrade)

Changed the File format to .tib as per the tutorial (had to stop the services to be able to save the file as was locked) and now the backup runs seemingly at a speed the same as before with version 2019, why not make the option obvious and in the GUI (user interface as an option). I can't see any benefit of changing to .tibx if it is this much slower than .tib (irrespective how to file backs up!).

I would of stayed with 2019 if known!

I'm sorry to see that others are having issues with the "new" release, Acronis True Image 2021.

I’m still experiencing slow backups that I reported in this thread:

https://forum.acronis.com/forum/acronis-true-image-2020-forum/backup-pe…

Initially, I was excited to see the release of Acronis True Image 2021. I felt certain that Acronis True Image 2021 would not have the abysmally slow backup performance I found in Acronis True Image 2020. 

Unfortunately, the speed of the backups has not increased. Needless to say, I am more than just a bit disappointed, especially after spending more money to see no improvement.

I previously contacted Acronis tech support regarding Acronis True Image 2020 on more than 10 occasions with no resolution. The support representative kept asking me to run the same tests and asking me the same questions over and over again even after I had sent him the information on more than one occasion.

The way this entire situation has been handled is a little more than unsettling. I have trusted Acronis for years, but I am becoming less and less comfortable as these most recent two releases have both been buggy.

Everyone’s data is important to them, otherwise we wouldn’t back it up. At this point I’m not certain what to do and would welcome any suggestions you may have, even if they are alternatives to Acronis.

Thanks in advance for any input you may have.
 

The backup speed does not worry me; I am more concerned about the integrity of the backup process. However, I can understand that for some users backup speed may be critical.

With ATI 2021 Acronis seems to have devoted major effort to the new Cyber Security capabilities rather than concentrating of the core backup and recovery functions.

If you have not already done so, please send your feedback to acronis - open ATU, click on help (left bottom) then select Send Feedback.

Hi Ian,

I appreciate your input and, of course, agree that the integrity of the backup process is vitally important.

Backup speed is important to me. This is because I don't want Acronis True Image 2020-2021 backups to be so slow that they are still running during my workday. The backups with Acronis True Image 2018 were fast enough that they were already completed by the time I came into the office.

I have reverted back to Acronis True Image 2018 and I am satisfied with it's performance.

Thanks again for your input.

Hi All,

Speed and Integrity of the backup is very important, however, I also find the latest versions of TIH to be so slow.

So, this is what I did, I uninstalled 2021 and went back to 2020.  Well, that did not help a bit.  So, I uninstalled 2020 and went back to TIH 2016.  Yes, I did say 2016.  Now I am back to great speed and guess what... backups of disks or file backups were accomplished with speed and integrity.  Yes, I have tested many restores and recovery to different type disks, Spinning, SSD and NVMe with my Windows 10/64 and all is well.  The only reason I moved up is the disk cloning functions but here again they were not reliable when I tested.  And that "protection" thing is totally out of hand.  I choose my virus and malware protection, not my backup software.  So all is good for now with TIH 2016.  We will see what 2022 brings.  Hopefully "Dramatic" changes....

Steve F.

Thank you Steve F. Perdido Beach

I plan to uninstall and go back to an older copy now and will not be upgrading again until speed has come back up to 2019 versions speed.

I know the integrity issue is a fear fudging factor for many to upgrade but I will avoid now.

Stephen N

I've been very happy with 2019 but it won't work with my new laptop, I get the very common ""Video mode setup error: Error 0x1400006"  Replacing the 2 files suggested by Acronis makes no difference.

Back to 2021, I bought a copy and the laptop now works, however, for such a small backup (16gb) it takes a lot longer than I would expect (9mins) this is using an external NVMe USB C (Gen2) connection.

Backing up my main PC using 2019 takes 5mins for a 60gb file, using 2021 it took 12mins, turning off file compression got it down to 5m50s with only 0.2gb added to the image size.

Update.

Managed to find my ATI 2019 disk and re-installed it.

Created a WinPE boot USB which now works on everything, even an Atom based laptop the standard boot USB for 2019 and 2020 wouldn't boot.

I've just ran full backups of the main PC and both laptops with normal file compression left switched on.  Backup times are massively shorter than using 2020 or 2021.  A full 66.3Gb backup of the main PC took 4m8s that's 1/3 of the time 2021 takes.

Looks like I'll be sticking with 2019 then :)

Was looking for a solution to the abysmaly slow backup speeds with the 2021 version of Acronis True Image and stumbled on this thread. Thought I would put my 2 cents in.

Like everyone else here, the 2019 version worked fine. Got worse in 2020 and the 2021 version is horrible. Acronis' 'progress' is going backwards. Each new version brings new problems and poorer performance. The most frustrating part? Acronis KNOWS IT ... and has done nothing to fix it. They shouldn't just be embarrassed, they should be ashamed.

I've read this whole thread (and literally a hundred other posts on this topic) and I see NO soultions to this speed problem other than regressing back to 2019. There's the occasional suggestion to start a 'support ticket' which by all accounts, accomplishes nothing at all.

December 15, 2020 I retired (second time). For 25 years I taught A.C.E. (Advanced Computer Engineering) at the Masters level for a major University. Got my Masters in CS in 1994 and my PHD in A.C.E. in 2000. My point for mentioning this? First, I'm not a novice and second, I have a low tolerance for IT related incompetence (from supposed IT professionals) and there is little doubt that is what is going on here.

Acronis plays this game of getting customers that submit support tickets to run endless/useless tests for what is CLEARLY a software only problem. Are they just stalling for time? I have 3 computers at home. Acronis 2021 runs like molasess in winter on all of them. One is a $20K custom built workststion that I do 3D rendering on for a holographic digital storage project I'm tinkering with. Intel has bought my last two patents. Maybe I can sell them a third before I find a new hobby.

This backup speed issuse is absolutely NOT hardware related. Period. Reverting back to the 2019 proves that. Data transfer rates to and from any of my internal or external NAS/DAS drives is stellar using every program on the computers ... except Acronis 2021. Yes, the protection feature is turned off. Yes, the clone feature works fine.

Testing the waters on different backup solutions (even the free ones) reveals that every one of them is an order of magnitude faster than Acronis 2021. Pretty sad state of affairs for a product that has such high reviews. Maybe they are fake? Hard to say.

While this is little more than a rant with no fix for the problem, I thought I would chime in and let folks know not to waste time wondering what is wrong with their computers. The problem lies with Acronis and Acronis alone. If they don't fix it really soon I'm simply going to move to another backup solution and quit flogging a dead horse.

Best of luck to the rest of you.     

As backup performance is much slower when using the *.tibx architecture regardless of the hardware it is being run on suggests that there is a problem with the implementation. I do not notice it all that much, but then I do not closely monitor what is going on. But there is no doubt that backups take much longer.

For me, the greater annoyance is the underwhelming CyberProtection features; I have disabled most of the features introduced in ATI 2021, but still have the features introduced in ATI 2017 through to ATI 2020 - but even they are a pain as they do not recognise common video/image manipulation programs as legitimate. 

Ian

Being a retired guy, I don't upgrade every year.  My "Old" version was 2016.  I had no issues with it.  I upgraded to 2021 and used it for 2 days before going back to 2016.  I'll keep an eye on this forum string to see if Acronis gets their act together.

I would suggest that individuals who are having performance problems download and install a programs such as Hwinfo64.  Hwinfo64 gives you your actual, true speed rating for your disk devices.  I found that even though my USB disks were rated for USB3 they were actually running at USB2 speeds.  The reason: the USB enclosures that held the disks were rated at USB2, NOT USB3.  Updated the enclosures and the backup times became reasonable.  (90 GB and 95GB backups with verification in approximately 30 minutes each).

John Switzer

Acronis TIH 2021

The technical advice is great here however proof is in the pudding - the speed on my device slowed after buying then installing the latest version, I was running 2018 before and now found that it was a waste of money for any speed-ups so went back to 2018 and staying there then changing once Aconis sort the speed issues out or buying a different backup program.

I noticed this morning that my weekly backup using Acronis 2021 was running painfully slow. Looking at the activity log, over the past couple of weeks the speed has gone from 258.6 Mbps to 22.7 Mbps to 2.8 Mbps today. It was almost 100x faster two weeks ago. I've got over 5TB free on the NAS so it's not like it's even close to full.

Any ideas about what might be going on here? See the activity log in the attachment.

Oh, this backup runs every Sunday morning so there's absolutely nothing else running on the PC.

I'm having a horrible time with this latest version.  Getting a 17 Mbps backup speed when I have GB internet and a pretty fast PC is unacceptable.  My backups are either taking 18-24 hours, they fail, or just get to within 2m remaining and stay there.  I'm paying a lot for Cloud backup and expect far better performance.  Looks like I'll be going back to Carbonite if this doesn't improve.

Is this issue related to where the backup is being stored?  When I followed the directions in the support forum it had a link to test the speed via a net speed link.  The optimal server and the only one that came up was in Singapore, not the US.  Is this why performance has tanked?  I don't want my data stored in a foreign country.  What's going on here?

Edgar, you should always choose the Acronis Cloud data centre that is closest to your geographic location to avoid any propagation delays across international networks.

See KB 4350: Acronis Backup to Cloud access ports and hostnames - for details of where all the servers are and what ports they use.

Use the above in conjunction with the Acronis Cloud Connection Verification Tool.

If you still have issues, then please open a Support Case direct with Acronis as they are the only ones with access to the server side of the Cloud support.

Note: once a backup task has been setup and ran for the first time, the data centre cannot be changed!  You would need to create a new backup task, select the local data centre and repeat the backup, then delete the incorrect location task.

Check your Acronis Account to ensure that this shows your correct country location.

I'm extremely late to the party.....

I too experienced severe performance issues with both 2020 and 2021.  I too reverted to and continue to use 2016.

After a lengthy interaction with Acronis Support, here is a portion of the last of the thread.

Update to my post from 3/9/21:

I have finally had it with Acronis and their horrific performance issues. Everything (and I do mean - everything) runs blazingly fast on my recently upgraded main workstation ($30K+ now) and attached NAS/DAS devices .... except Acronis TI 2021. What a god awful product that gets worse every year.

Two weeks ago I switched to Macrium Reflect for Workstations after experimenting with the free version for 30 days. My daily full system image backups of nearly 3TB of data that took Acronis 12-16 hours to complete (sometimes it would just quit) is finished in just over an hour using Macrium Reflect. I do both a local and off-site backup. I avoid any use of the 'cloud' as I believe putting your data in the hands of strangers is dumb. I noticed that Acronis was spending more time reading the target drive (any of them) than it was writing to it. WTH??  There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to what Acronis 2021 was doing. I don't think they have much interest in fixing it either. Sooo ... I've moved on.

While Macrium Reflect costs a few dollars more, it does EVERYTHING better and faster. It provides more information, more options and amazingly - tech support can (optionally) be reached by phone. Imagine THAT!! Not sure if the home version provides that service.

You can choose to hope and pray that Acronis will get their act together (don't hold your breath) or you can make the move to a better (in every way) product and put your backup problems behind you.

Choose wisely.

Having been a long time user of Acronis TI, I too have now given up as far as expecting Acronis to fix the terrible response time issues in their product. 

I persevered with the prior version, upgraded to 2021 thinking it couldn't get any worse and hopefully they had fixed the issues but sadly they have shown no interest in acknowledging the performance problems  - let alone actually bothering to fix them.   Instead they try to blame the customer's hardware. 

I have now moved to another product that actually performs as expected and does the job way better and faster than Acronis TI.

Goodbye Acronis. I could never recommend your products to anybody..
 

Ok, I'm joining this. 3.55 GB incremental backup taking over 8 hours!!

An observation that might explain poor backup speed to a HDD using the 2020 version.

Windows 10 Task Manager shows that the amount of data being read is about equal to the amount of data being written. And the hard disk Active Time is at 100% with a write rate of only 15 MB/sec 

Why is the Acronis backup doing as much reading as writing of the backup disk drive?

If the large amount of reads of the backup drive during writes is causing disk head seeks, that would explain the slow write rate and extremely long backup times.
I would expect a backup app to a USB external HDD to be doing sequential writes for best performance and very little no reading to minimize disk head seeks. The backup app appears to be very inefficient. I repeat: the rate of reads during backup is about the same as writes. What?

My USB 3 HDD is a recent Seagate model. 
CrystalDiskMark reports a sequential write speed of 160 MB/sec is possible.
Acronis is backing up at a rate of 15 MB/sec for the majority of the backup time. There are times when it does go above 100 MB/sec.
The slow write rate is when the backup data is from a high speed SSD NVMe drive.
A 1.8TB full backup took about 2 days. Not good for new high speed hardware.

I just created a new backup of a spinning hard drive to an external USB 3 spinning hard drive using Acronis 2020.
The backup performance of the first full backup I just did was very good with a write rate often at 150 MB/sec as it should be. The read rate of the backup disk was in the low KB/s, not MB/s.

So, the performance issue occurs with a full system backup of multiple drives.
In that case, the read rate of the backup drive is in MB/s about equal to the low 15 MB/s write rate of the backup drive. That occurs when the last drive of 4 is being backed up (high speed C drive).

The mystery is: Why is the read rate of the backup drive so high?
That is most likely causing the slow backup drive write rate because of disk head seeks. That results in backup times of days for a backup of 1.8TB

I bought the Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office a couple of days ago because I really loved True Image back in the days... Oh my has it changed...

I've got a quite powerful workstation with a Xeon Platinum 8268, a NVMe SSD as system drive and a 40 TB RAID 6 consisting of 12x 4 TB Seagate NAS HDDs as main storage that runs ca. 1 GByte/s sequentially. Everything is Bitlocker encrypted, the NVMe via hardware encryption and the RAID via software encryption.

Still, the current Acronis manages to be really slow.
It begins with the start which takes about 1.5 minutes, most of it during applying user settings even without any backup jobs defined. And yes, I created all the folder exceptions at Windows Defender Anti Virus, it made no difference. And it's of course installed on the NVMe.

As others already reported it works excessively with random access. If the backup is stored on my RAID this results in most actions at the backup taking forever as he reads with 1.5 MByte/s and less and seems to check the backup file with any action you do. I stopped waiting after half an hour and let it run for the night, the next morning it was finished.
I moved the image to the NVMe drive, now it's acceptable, but storing the image on the comparatively unreliable SSD isn't something I like.
So please get your developers some spinning disks for storing the backups so that they can optimize the access pattern.

I'm really surprised that Acronis can't handle uninitialized disks, you have to initialize them to MBR / GPT first. This is really annoying as I of course want to keep the original type and don't want to look it up separately. Why would you allow to make a full drive backup without being able to recreate the drive exactly as it was? Ok, nowadays it's mostly GPT, but still.

Another annoying thing is that you can't copy a backup back to the original drive because suddenly it's too small.
I think this happens because the backup is taken with all the volume information but as you have to use initialized disks a couple of KBytes are already used up and Acronis is too stupid to see this and properly handle it.
The only option to resolve this was to restore to a larger drive, shrink one of the partitions a little bit and then take a new copy of the backup from the larger drive. With this smaller partition I can finally restore the image to the original drive.

And then there are the really odd writes (according to the performance monitor) to the NTFS Volume information of all drives when Acronis checks which drives are suitable for recovery. Why would you write into the NTFS database of my system drive for this?!?

And you can't uninstall it without using an additional cleanup tool - but at least your tool worked properly even with the trial version. Still, that's so 90s...
https://forum.acronis.com/forum/acronis-cyber-protect-home-office-forum…

Check the following parameter in the Script File Streams section.

 

C:\ProgramData\Acronis\TrueImageHome\Scripts *.tib.tis files. Usually one for each backup.

<disk_speed_limit speed_limit_mode="absolute" value="12499" />

 

Mine was set to 1,000

Michael, thanks for sharing this resolution here and in the other topic.

One issue that users need to be aware of is that Acronis Active Protection will try to prevent them from saving any changes made to the Scripts .tib.tis files if this is enabled.

For most ATI versions, you can simply select to turn off AAP from the ATI GUI to make such a change but with later ACPHO versions, this is not effective and even when turned off these files are 'protected' unless action is taken to disable the background Windows service for AAP, which in turn may need Windows to be restarted.

I've installed the new version and it fixes some things but makes others worse.

Now I can recover a full SSD on the same model again now without resizing (as written in my previous comment above I had to shrink the partition first with the old version).

But: It looks like backup & recover of a non-UEFI drive from an older pre-UEFI laptop doesn't work anymore, the recovered drive seems to be changed to a UEFI drive which isn't bootable for the old laptop. I'm not 100% sure but at least with this laptop cloning wasn't possible.

Michael Liebelt wrote:

I've installed the new version and it fixes some things but makes others worse.

Now I can recover a full SSD on the same model again now without resizing (as written in my previous comment above I had to shrink the partition first with the old version).

But: backup & recover of a non-UEFI drive from an older pre-UEFI laptop doesn't work anymore, the recovered drive seems to be changed to a UEFI drive which isn't bootable for the old laptop.

Michael, the BIOS boot mode of the system being used for recovery determines the partition scheme used on the recovered drive.  So if your PC being used is UEFI BIOS boot mode, any recovery will create a UEFI / GPT drive!  This has been the case for a long time, not just for ATI 2021.

Please submit Feedback directly to Acronis (use the tool provided in the GUI Help section) and ask for your vote to be added to the Acronis internal feature request: TI-179333 Allow selecting the boot mode (BIOS or UEFI) after recovery/cloning.

If you use Acronis rescue media for the recovery, then assuming that you can boot that media in Legacy BIOS boot mode, you can recover a Legacy backup to a drive as MBR.

KB 59877: Acronis True Image: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media

@Steve

Ah, that's some good information! I really thought the older version did the trick, but I'm not sure anymore...

Either way, the good news is that the full drive recovery now works properly without adjusting partition sizes.

I have dealt with Acronis support for many years and I agree with several users and especially William Hall. 

I have used Acronis for almost 8 years.  Backup is usually fine but since 2021 Acronis Cyber Protect Home center, it is taking 3-5 times longer to backup and the validation time has also increased by 4.

I had the primary drive crash on one of my servers and Acronis could not recover it.   Acronis support had me work on it for several week  until I decided to rebuild the drive by reloading windows on it.

Already set:

My <disk_speed_limit speed_limit_mode="absolute" value="0"

I am done with Acronis

Dear Edward Walsh,
Thank you for reaching out and being with us so many years. Performance problems are usually complex in order to help you personally it is crucial to properly investigate what happened, the best way to do so is to contact Acronis support: Customer Service and Support (acronis.com)

I have dealt with support in the past and it is very poor quality support.

I have used other backup software like Paragon in the past and in the past it never took this long.for similar sized files and backup and that was on slower computers not state of the art.. This should not take this long and should give accurate restoration time. I have always had bad luck with Acronis and poor quality support. Only once out of 9 years has Acronis restored anything I needed. So I am going somewhere else and lose a major project because Acronis can not restore the file in time..

Dear Edward Walsh,

Thank you for the feedback. We would investigate support quality if you could kindly provide the case number?