Firstdefense - Compressed folders

[starfish_001]

I'm a recent convert to Firstdefence from Goback - simply one of the best buys I have made.

But ... My main image is quite big - 14 GB.

I now have six snapshos as follows:

A rotating set of 3 for my main image - normal - week - month
A test snapshot based on the above
2 snapshot of my new machine build - different xp product key


This all takes up a lot of room - I don't use Data Anchoring - but have excluded a few no critical folders. My data lives on a separate pair of disk.

I've been thinking about using NTFS compression on a few of the larger directories. Encarta, Copliot, Copernic - nothing critial in them.

Ideas on better more effecitive solutions for keeping disk consumption in check appreciated?

[Acadia]

Hi, Starfish. You can create Archive Snapshots on those other drives of yours, they are smaller than the regular Snapshots but not by much. The advantage would be freeing space up on your main drive, plus updating the Archive Snapshots goes MUCH faster than updating the regular Snapshots. Good luck, and enjoy FD, it's a great toy.

Acadia

[Peter2150]

Originally Posted by starfish_001

I'm a recent convert to Firstdefence from Goback - simply one of the best buys I have made.

But ... My main image is quite big - 14 GB.

I now have six snapshos as follows:

A rotating set of 3 for my main image - normal - week - month
A test snapshot based on the above
2 snapshot of my new machine build - different xp product key


This all takes up a lot of room - I don't use Data Anchoring - but have excluded a few no critical folders. My data lives on a separate pair of disk.

I've been thinking about using NTFS compression on a few of the larger directories. Encarta, Copliot, Copernic - nothing critial in them.

Ideas on better more effecitive solutions for keeping disk consumption in check appreciated?

Hi Starfish

I'd cut the snapshots back. External drives are fairly cheap. I don't use the week, month concept, because I really wouldn't want to go back there except in an emergency. I use Image for Windows images for that purpose. I keep two archives snaps on external drives as backups and refresh them daily. I also keep 1 snap on my drive that I use back and forth for testing etc.

In your case you could easily cut to 3 maybe even two.

With 3 you'd have your primary, your newbuild, and your test. Keep others as archive on external drive.

You could also cut it to two. Primary and newbuild, and test to archive on external drive. Then you'd do your "test" in your primary snap, and when you want to get rid of it you'd boot to newbuild refresh primary from archived test.

Try these combo's doing a simple test to be sure all is working as planned.

Pete

[starfish_001]

Originally Posted by Peter2150

Hi Starfish

I'd cut the snapshots back. External drives are fairly cheap. I don't use the week, month concept, because I really wouldn't want to go back there except in an emergency. I use Image for Windows images for that purpose. I keep two archives snaps on external drives as backups and refresh them daily. I also keep 1 snap on my drive that I use back and forth for testing etc.

In your case you could easily cut to 3 maybe even two.

With 3 you'd have your primary, your newbuild, and your test. Keep others as archive on external drive.

You could also cut it to two. Primary and newbuild, and test to archive on external drive. Then you'd do your "test" in your primary snap, and when you want to get rid of it you'd boot to newbuild refresh primary from archived test.

Try these combo's doing a simple test to be sure all is working as planned.
Pete

Excellent I'm cutting back snapshots and using archives more actively - kinda forgot that if I have one bootable snapshot I can always load and external snapshot. I'd used snapshot as fixed check points - e.g. clean install rather than more actively.

I store the snapshot on a different drive so that shoud be pretty safe. I think I'll go with 3 snapshots ( a big saving )

- Primary and newbuild, and test
- and some archives - not exported any to DVD yet might try that


Thanks for the wake up