Data Recovery and Disk Utilities Forum @R-TT

Bionic wrote: Wed Jan 22, 2025 2:31 pm Further tests including my Y: partition (I wouldn't normally do that" but "Operation 4 of 6" takes two minutes for completion (my entire OS)

Please contact our techsupport with system dumps when image creations are fast and slow. About -> Write system dump.

I just wanted to add since I happened across this that I have had the same issue with R-Drive Image being unbelievably slow, ever since I bought it. I have contacted support about it, but got no solutions. As a purchase of R-Drive does not include updates, I'm stuck with this version. I'm backing up right now and the backup process is on the third day, backing up to a fast new drive from a fast new drive, using a fast CPU. There are no hardware or OS bottlenecks. The bottleneck is R-Drive. Copying files to the drive by hand is fast.

I've also experienced that about a third of the backups that R-Drive has tried to make are corrupted. Those are just the ones I know about. I haven't tried to restore a full backup. Most of the bad backup files start with something like $bad001$.... The most recent corrupted file simply looked like a normal file, but when I clicked on it the "Image details" say "Image file is corrupted".

R-Drive Image fails silently in the background. The only way I know is if I look at the backups folder. It doesn't stay awake while backing up, even if that option is checked, and when backups are interrupted as they often are when backing up is so excruciatingly slow, the backups often get corrupted, which is inexcusable behavior. There is no second attempt, the backups simply are not made. (I'm using Microsoft PowerToys Awake right now to keep the computer on for this epic backup process, and I installed this tool solely so that R-Drive can hopefully complete its backup. R-Drive will not wake the computer to start a backup, but the computer can go to sleep and possibly ruin a backup.)

I bought R-Drive based on a good review from PC World, so I actually wrote them and let them know my experience.

I'm using R-Drive 7.1 (Build 7110). There are no updates provided, so this is the version I'm stuck with. (R-Drive will let you click the update button, but then get confused and not let you update, since R-Tools doesn't provide updates.)

When I told R-Tools that I had a couple of other less important computers that it would be nice to back up from time to time, they suggested I get the $300 Technician version. This when R-Drive has already been the slowest and least reliable backup software I have used.

I didn't do that. I've been using Paragon Hard Disk Manager Advanced, which costs less for multiple computers, and Paragon Backup & Recovery Community Edition, which is free for personal use. These tools also support more archive formats, which I like...

...In part because I was burned in the past by Acronis and Macrium. They want you to install their software just to be able to mount the archive image from an old computer. Acronis over time got to be bloated and buggy -- though I will say, the backups usually did complete. Macrium used to offer a free edition, but then left those users out in the cold.

So I had hoped that R-Drive would be a solution. I'm familiar with similar open-source tools such as Clonezilla and Restic, and can recommend Sysinternals' (Mark Russinovich at Microsoft) free tool if all you need to do is to create a quick image of a disk in a widely-readable VHDX format. Quick as in, the bottleneck is the disk speeds, you don't have to come back next week as with R-Drive, fingers crossed, to see whether your backup ever completed, and if so, whether or not it is intact rather than corrupted.

This message isn't really a tech support query anymore so much as an epilogue. I had high hopes for R-Drive, but it has let me down.

I like that it's light on resources and that the support is very friendly. I think that the price for one computer at home is reasonable. It cloned my disk to another disk when I replaced the SSD, and that was lightning-fast. So fast I was confused and thought either I was using a different program or that the copy couldn't possibly be correct. But it worked, and took about as long as it would take to heat up a pizza in the oven. Meanwhile the backup I started two days ago is still. Going. The good news is that it estimates that there are only 2 hours and 50 minutes remaining in the backup, so I have my fingers crossed!

A few extra details for this postmortem:

- Windows 11
- slow backups from both a 1 TB Kioxia SSD and a 4 TB Samsung SSD
- external drives used are USB 3 (eventually winding up at Thunderbolt 4 ports on the computer)
- all drives are formatted NTFS
- drives I have backed up either have one large data partition, or one large data partition plus several smaller partitions for various rescue and system purposes -- which is about as standard as it gets
- drives I have backed up to have one large partition
- R-Drive was one of the first tools I installed and I keep this system fairly lean so conflicts seem unlikely

Will send my dumps momentarily, took half a day messing about in different scenarios just to verify as one dump would make no sense, luckily I had saved previous images, if more send their dumps in they will surely find what's causing all this .. program is not slow but it can be depending on how you have partitioned your PC and how much free space included in backup, all that will affect your image timings with several hundred percent even if used space is the very same in all scenarios

@sdanrt, I see you have a 4 TB Samsung to, if that is your system drive?, try re-partition it like this with R-drives partitionmanager

And exclude most of all that free space in your backup OS backup at least, my timings went down to approx 2 minutes by doing this for a full OS image, rather than almost half an hour

Hi guys.

Unfortunately I've sort of moved on from R-Tools, as much as I wanted to like them. (Toronto is Murdoch Mysteries territory!) I am not a beta tester for them. I paid for software that did not live up to the reviews in PC World. Fast and efficient it is not. Slow and buggy it is.

There are things to love about it. The command-line abilities for example. The clean use of tasks. I think it's supposed to be lean when it's running, that it's basically well-engineered, and that the company is friendly.

But I've been using it for two years. I've contacted support, and they don't seem to be all that bothered that it's slow and produces corrupt archives. I'm not entitled to updates even though it says "update available" in the software. So I've got a lemon, and I'm stuck with it unless I move on to other solutions such as Paragon's. I have no reason to believe that two years into these problems, R-Tools is going to fix this for me.

I try to be a decent guy, however, and I realize as someone who does know how to beta test that I'm in a position to help. Of course complaining on a public forum probably does not help their bottom line, but maybe it will spur them to take this seriously for a change.

I admire the dedication to R-Tools of people who are willing to repartition their drive (!!!) in order to continue using their buggy backup software. That is admirable, or quixotic, I'm not sure. But there is no way in hell I am repartitioning my drive, especially using the buggy software that is causing me headaches in the first place. I could repartition it using Paragon, but it would be weird to do that in order to continue using R-Drive which has been such a pain in the ass.

In order to try to narrow down what is really slow I have done some additional testing. But what I have found is that R-Drive is slow for me under all circumstances.

If I back up from fast internal SSD to fast internal SSD, that is much faster. But it is still very slow. I find that no matter what I'm backing up to what, R-Drive operates at a fraction of the speed of just manually copying files (usually one-tenth the speed or less). So that is absurd. It has been like this for the entire time I have used it. But as I've added files to my drives, this is no longer tolerable. The software has never worked right, and now is such a clunker that it is totally useless to me. For the money I spent, I got negative reward, and it's time to cut my losses.

I don't think that changing the source partitioning will help. As it happens, I have a recovery partition on C that is only 20 GB, and R-Drive is every bit as slow backing that up. I'm not about to experiment with changing my entire setup just to keep using software that has failed me. But I can confirm that on my machine, the culprit is not large partition size.

There is no way that R-Drive should be using as much CPU as it is when doing the backup from SSD to SSD. I have compression set to faster speed and I have a fast enough computer that it's nuts that it would be using 30 to 50 percent CPU. Not a bottleneck since it's not 100 percent, but that is hardly lightweight. And the speed of the backup is still far too slow. Yes, when using SSDs that can transfer multiple GB per second, and it's doing a tenth of that or less, it at least does not take days as it does over USB. But why is it so slow?

If I experiment with drives and USB ports, I can get a result that is a little less slow, but still slow. The least slow solution I've found is internal SSD to external SSD via a specific port. All I can guess is that while SSDs do have very fast access times, when transferring files to any drive, whether SSD or disk, they don't always hit their max transfer rate right at the beginning. If R-Drive is starting and stopping its writes or doing something confusing, it might slow down a drive if it can't get up to speed.

However, because R-Drive starts out slow with reads right from the beginning, which I can tell from the Task Manager, it may not have anything to do with writes (unless it's throttling its reads based on how fast it expects to be able to write).

Unfortunately, too, the setups that are the least slow for me are not setups that are feasible for me to use for actual backups, only for testing. So even these least-slow solutions are not helpful for me. (For example backing up to the fastest drive that doesn't have enough space for backups.)

I have done a variety of tests and compared R-Drive to manually copying files, and in every circumstance it is slow. I have not used Paragon on this computer yet, but when I tested it elsewhere it backed up at a rate that you would expect given the media being used, and it was very light on CPU. Those are the main things I ask. I also love that it is available in a free edition that lets me mount backups on any computer I want. I bought Paragon in part to display my gratitude toward companies that offer something for free to the community. I feel like I've given R-Drive every opportunity to impress me, but it has just repeatedly let me down, and I'm done with it. It's not my job as a paying customer to figure out what's wrong with software I am not even entitled to updates for.

I can confirm however that SSD to USB is slow, SSD to SSD is slow, internal to internal is slow, internal to external is slow, external to internal is slow, large partitions are slow, small partitions are slow.

I can speed it up a little bit with little adjustments, such as which external drive I use in which port, or escalating the priority in the Task Manager. But no matter what, it's just slow. And it's repeatedly produced corrupted archives. And I'm here trying to figure out what's wrong with it, which does not seem like a great use of my time.

In any case, good luck in solving these issues. To the dedicated users, wow. To everyone else, if software isn't working for you, consider that it might be time to switch.

Oh, and by the way, imaging software that recognizes the filesystem doesn't typically try to back up an entire partition including empty space. So repartitioning to make the partition smaller should make no difference. And I can confirm that the speed problem here is not that it was trying to back up the empty space, it is that it was backing up the used space at a very slow speed. Task Manager is able to show performance info both for individual drives and for individual processes, so I can see that reading and writing is simply not fast.

Alt wrote: Fri Jan 24, 2025 3:25 pm

Bionic wrote: Wed Jan 22, 2025 2:31 pm Further tests including my Y: partition (I wouldn't normally do that" but "Operation 4 of 6" takes two minutes for completion (my entire OS)

Please contact our techsupport with system dumps when image creations are fast and slow. About -> Write system dump.

My report with dumps should be in now, at your support page could you please arrange so people can attach their dumps?

Personally I'm not keen to upload system dumps of any kind to random public filesharing hosts so had to use my own private hosting space for this matter, it's just a lot of extra hoops for a simple report, Thank you

sdanrt wrote: Tue Jan 28, 2025 4:56 pm Oh, and by the way, imaging software that recognizes the filesystem doesn't typically try to back up an entire partition including empty space. So repartitioning to make the partition smaller should make no difference. And I can confirm that the speed problem here is not that it was trying to back up the empty space, it is that it was backing up the used space at a very slow speed. Task Manager is able to show performance info both for individual drives and for individual processes, so I can see that reading and writing is simply not fast.

Used and free space is exactly what this is all about, free space shouldn't normally be an issue but it is,
I know this because I could get the estimation timer to halt at different percentages depending where partitions or free space is located,
it strongly indicates and in all scenarios it halts on large free space and with less free space it got absurdly faster as in several hundred percent

I hope my dumps will help here, I've sent them three different scenarios so they have something to compare with

And yes it's admirable when users spend the extra mile of their time to narrow down things like this, I have a long track record of translating popular software titles and lots of beta testing in my past, I don't mind it though even if it involves re-partitioning or taking a day or even when paying for it as in this case, without the dumps y'all be stuck so they indeed need them and the more voices heard, more likely is it to be fixed

Just tried 7302 with one of my previous slower scenario images normally taking 30 minutes, this build is a completely different monster being right up there with the competition when all space included or selected on my SSD, great job team and thank you so much for looking in to this!, this if now completely fixed?, it'll make a lot of people happier guaranteed, and thank you for enabling a GUI for own drivers, a really nice upgrade this one!!



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Next on my whish list to improve even further would perhaps be a boot menu selector as an addition rather than just BIOS?, I say that cause many people are still seeking alternatives for Macrium, just as I did a while back and found this sweet program, nonetheless thanks for the massive improvements this time

I just did a test (R-Drive.image V.7.2 Compilation: 7302 and 7303) with one of my previous images that normally take 22 minutes, the copy begins well, but when it reaches 49% it starts very slow. After 22 minutes the work ends, it happens by copying and restoring. I use a 1TB Samsung SSD (Windows 11) and another 256Gb. Samsung (backups).

Comment that I have tried a demonstration version of (Macrium) and it takes 2 minutes and 45 seconds.