Backup, wipe, restore 48 hours and counting??

[glasshalffull]

I have a win7 64 bit with 100 gb free of 452 gb
intel i3 2.4 ghz m370 8gb ram

I have an external drive i want to backup the entire laptop to which has 740gb free of 950gb.

I want to backup the entire laptop, wipe it clean to regain some performance, and then restore my entire system and data.

I started with the built in-default backup and it has been running for more than 48 hours and the progress bar shows it's less then half way done and wasn't really gaining progress after awhile.....progress seemed to stop.....i had to cancel the backup.

Is that normal or did something go wrong?

what is the best way to do what i am describing and can it be done faster than my results above?

I searched here and google and i see acronis true image is mentioned alot

would it be faster or am i going to just have to sit and wait for days like i was originally going?

thanks

 

[cl-scott]

Two things come to mind.

First the built-in backup program for Windows 7 really should not be used. It's a legacy program for people who are coming from the Windows NT/2000 era systems and have backups from this program.

Second, if you're going to back up your entire system, then basically lay down that same image later, how do you expect to get any performance gains? At the end of the whole process your computer is essentially the same as it was when you started. If you think your system is slow because of a software related cause, then the only way to resolve this would be to go in and manually restore your system. If you apply an image of your system made when the performance degrading software issue was present, then that issue will be there every time you restore that image.

 

[glasshalffull]

My system is not running terribly slow, but I was wanting to attempt to gain any performance that i could as I'll running some larger adobe programs on it.

I'm not up to speed on the backup and restore process, thought that there might be "excess" software fragments i could get rid of to help but didn't realize your point of the computer being essentially the same....my fault....a lack of knowledge on my part.

so I guess the best way to go would be manually restore the system like you mentioned.

best to do that with Acronis?

was the timeframe of the original backup i started normal or did it sound like there might have been something wrong?

I know it's gonna be different for every computer, but wanting to get an idea of how long it's gonna take to create a backup......several hours, a couple days or a week or more?

Any ideas?

I'll start looking into how to manually restore

thanks for your thoughts