5

I use Acronis True Image backup software on a new mid-2015 MacBook Pro Retina with a 2.8GHz processor and a 1TB SSD running High Sierra and APFS. Incremental backups, even when there's almost no files that are changed on my system, take about 30 minutes to scan ~300GB. Almost all of this is scanning time to look for changes. Activity Monitor's Energy tab reports Energy Impact of about 150.

Is this normal? Seems like a long time and a lot of battery expenditure (if I enabled backups while not plugged in) for a disk scan.

Also, are there other less battery-intensive backup software for Macs? Or should I realistically expect any backup system to be a time and resource hog because a full disk scan is inherently energy-intensive and time-consuming?

Finally, is there anything I can do (other than removing files from my disk or excluding them from backups!) to improve backup times and/or energy cost?

Improve this question
2
  • I'm just curious, is there a reason you don't use the built-in Time Machine software? Understanding why you don't will help users provide better answers for you?
    – Monomeeth ♦
    Commented Apr 25, 2018 at 23:16
  • @Monomeeth - Good question. My initial reason was wanting to make an image backup from an old MBP (work computer) that I could restore to a new MBP (personal laptop). I was also interested in offsite (cloud) backup. Finally, I use Parallels and was looking for to do incremental backups on my ~60GB Windows VM. Acronis seemed like the best tool to meet these requirements. From what I read online, Time Machine fell short on all three.
    – Justin Grant
    Commented Apr 26, 2018 at 3:50

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
2
+50

With those sorts of times it would appear that Acronis does a brute-force scan of the whole filesystem comparing each file.

But since 10.7 (Lion) macOS provides a mechanism called FSEvents that allows an app to be notified about changes so it can do its job in a much more efficient way. Time Machine uses FSEvents.

So, to answer your question: Your times are about right for software that is doing the scan inefficiently. As a Time Machine user I see far shorter times for much more data (600GB on SSD to external 1TB HDD over Thunderbolt) using my 3GHz i7 MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2013) running High Sierra and APFS.

My recommendation is that you change software to one that is more modern in its approach.

PS: Time Machine would backup your old Mac and restore to a new Mac, though it does it using its usual loose files approach rather than a single monolithic image. It would also only backup changes to your Parallels VM – no such luck for a VMware Fusion user like myself.

Improve this answer
1
  • 1
    Good answer, thanks. Following your advice, I switched over to Time Machine for LAN backups and limited Acronis to a weekly offsite (cloud) backup.
    – Justin Grant
    Commented May 3, 2018 at 1:29

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .