Windows Home Server PC Restore Time

[AllWhacked]

Well, I have an Acer Aspire WHS and one of my Seagate 7200.11 HDDs crapped out due to that firmware issue. Luckily I had the server in place to backup, the bad news is it's 2 weeks out of date because I was cheap and wanted to turn off the server to save electricity. The good news is that the hard drive only stored video games.

In any case, I popped in the PC Restore disk and followed the instructions (though I think the disk is not compatible with 4GB of RAM as it crashed). Anyway, I started the restore and it took a long time before giving an estimated finish time. First it said 1 day 22 minutes, next 3 days and 20 minutes and now 5 days 11 minutes. My network is on a 10/100 Linksys Router.

It's restoring about 400GB of data across two drives. How long should this realistically take?

 

[heymrdj]

Judging that a 120GB backup of data on my laptop via 100mbs takes about 8 hours I would say 2 days minimum.

 

[RebateMonger]

If you are going to do a restore, it's probably safest to download and burn the latest version of the PC Restore CD. But your Acer is obviously pretty new, so you very well could have the latest version. My desktop, which I've restored twice this year using WHS, has 4 GB of memory (Vista Business x32) and I've had no problems.

With a 1Gbps network connection (I get about 30 Mbps to 50 Mbps transfers, typically), I THINK it took around two hours last time I restored a 200 GB IDE disk. But I don't remember for sure. Based upon my recollection, it'd take you at least twelve hours with the 10/100 connection.

Next time, assuming you have 1 Gbps NICs on both, you might want to move the desktop PC next to the WHS and connect them with a CAT5e or CAT6 patch cable. With Gb adapters, "normal" patch cable should work (you don't need a crossover cable or a switch).

Also, it might make sense to restore one volume or disk at a time, so you can confirm your results earlier. The last time I restored a server with Acronis, I wished I'd restored the boot volume first and THEN restored the data volume. I had to wait until the VERY end of both transfers to see if things were working right. That was pretty stressful considering an entire doctor office's work schedule depended on when this restore would be completed.

 

[AllWhacked]

Thanks for your input. I started my restore around midnight and now some 16 hours later it shows about 1/4 complete with a new 2 day estimate, I guess it will take at least 1.5 - 2 days. In any case, I'm kinda glad this happened as I was using a WHS to backup my work PCs and knowing that it will take this long to do a complete restore (though my one at work is much smaller), I think I'll continue to park a couple imaged backups on spare hard drives to perform a restore via the eSATA in the future. I'll also make an effort to use my gigabit switch as well.

 

[RebateMonger]

Well, let us know how long it takes and if all is well. And definitely hook the machines up with a Gigabit connection when you need to do a big restore like that.

 

[AllWhacked]

Bad news! I came back from the movies and saw that the restore was aborted due to some "network connectivity" issue. Not only that, but the server while on could not be accessed via the remote desktop or the server console, though I can access my shares fine. I ended up shutting it down manually and rebooting. I took a look at the event viewer and found that my restore of the C:\ (70GB) drive finished in about 12.5 hours. I'm not sure if the server tried to restore both the C and the D simultaneously or not, but 12 hours to do 70GB is not too impressive. Anyway, the log noted that at midnight the server did a cleanup of the backup database, which is the exact time it also logged that the restoration of drive D:\ failed. Anyway, I'm going to try again with a cat6 cable plugged in directly as my gigabit switch is at my office. I'll keep you posted on my progress.

 

[RebateMonger]

When you get the CAT6 connection, pass a couple of gigabytes of files back and forth and check the transfer rate in both directions.

 

[Engineer]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger

With a 1Gpbs network connection (I get about 30 Mbps to 50 Mbps transfers, typically), I THINK it took around two hours last time I restored a 200 GB IDE disk. But I don't remember for sure. Based upon my recollection, it'd take you at least twelve hours with the 10/100 connection.

30 to 50 Megabit or MegaByte? If bit, why so low on a gigabit connection (or is that normal)?

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: Engineer
30 to 50 Megabit or MegaByte? If bit, why so low on a gigabit connection (or is that normal)?

Sorry. I meant a "Capital B". MegaBytes per second. 30 to 50 MEGABYTES/second is a conglomerate of file transfers I see. My transfers vary from thousands of tiny files to very large (800 Gigabyte) virtual hard drive files. All of my servers are running inside a Hyper-V server and are always running low-price Realtek NICs on the client PC side and low-end switches.

 

[AllWhacked]

Update on slow restore times. My primary PC and spare PC are connected to my Linksys router (which connects to my WHS) via a Belkin router in access point mode. I noticed this morning while doing some file transfers that my spare PC was getting extremely slow transfer speeds, like only 1MB/s. A second look showed that it was indeed only connecting at 10 Tbase. A restart of the Belkin router fixed this, but I suspect that my slow restore speed on the primary PC may have been due to the Belkin router. However because I turned it off and never looked at the connection lights to see if my primary connected at 10 vs 100, I won't know for sure. But that might explain the 12 hour restore time on only 70GBs.

 

[RebateMonger]

Sounds like you've discovered the source of the problem.

I thought I was going crazy, but I KNOW I've restored a couple of "typical" office PCs, with maybe 20 to 40 GigaBytes of data, in an hour or so across a 10/100 office network. The client calls me, I tell them to insert the WHS Recovery CD, and I ask them to call me when the computer's working again.

 

[AllWhacked]

Update: I redid the restore via my 10/100 router--this time making sure I was connected at 100Tbase. The good news is the restore took 9 hours or less (not sure as I wasn't home earlier to see). The bad news is that the computer still won't boot. It gets to the part where I see some Vista black text just before the Windows logo flashes with the scrolling bar. But the Windows logo doesn't come up and says something along the lines of not finding the OS. It then boots to the command prompt with an option to esc. Which then gives you a screen to boot either Vista or NT/2000/XP. In any case, I'm going to try again and if that fails i'm just going to wait till Windows 7 pops up on Technet and I'll install that. Meh!