Acronis TI 10 not compressing music files

I'm using Acronis TI 10 with Vista Home Premium. I just backed up my Music folder to an external Hard Drive using Normal compression, which says that it compresses files to about 55% of original size. Well, the backup is exactly the same size as the original. What happened?

 

ATI's compression is lossless, so it can only go so far. Music files (mp3, m4a) are already highly compressed and don't for much further compression -- they especially can't undergo much further losssless compression because even the weakest mp3 or m4a compression will compress as much as it can losslessly before it begins to due lossy compression. (Winzip has an algorithm to further compress such files but the amount of further comrpession is extremely slight.) Now add to that the fact that compression also has some overhead that goes along with it, and that tib files ( ATI backup files) include checksum values every so many bytes so that the file integrity can be verified, and you end up with a backup of music files or jpegs or other highly compresed files not taking up any less room than the originals.

It's not so much a fact about ATI as about the already compressed files.

 

thanks

 

And I would add that True Image's strength lies in its ability to backup the entire drive and restore the same using its bootable Rescue CD. For music files you would be better off using a straight copy with Windows Explorer which keeps the files in their native format. Or if you want some kind of automation such as copying only changed/new files after the initial copy then a free program like Karen's Replicator, which also copies files in native format, might be what you need.

 

My approach as well except I use SyncBack. I use it for all my data files since many are already compressed and the ones that aren't take very little space in comparison.

 

Thanks for your responses and suggestions. I had been doing pretty much what you guys are, using Tera Copy to copy my music files to an external HDD. I just got tired of having to remember to do this every time I ripped a disc, so that's why I started including music files in my regular backup. It just caught me by surprise when I saw how much space it took.

 

Jeff,
I also use (schedule) Karen's Replicator everynight to copy any changes in designated user folders to another drive. It's just routine.

 

Thanks for your input. That's 2 people suggesting Karen's Replicator, so I'll give it a shot. The office where I work still uses the old tape backup, so I don't have much experience in these matters. I appreciate the help.

 

There is one thing to be aware of in case it is important to the protection of your data.

Assume you make some major edits to a data file and then save it. Your backup routine runs at the scheduled time and copies the modified file to your backup location overwriting the existing backup file. The next day you realize that your edits were not what you really wanted or the file has some other issue resulting from the edits. You go to the backup location but find that the backup file is the edited file and has the same problem.

For this reason, I purchased SyncBackSE which allows versioning (old backup files are kept in a special folder) so I can go back in time to a previous version. The program permits setting numbers of versions that are kept for what length of time, etc. Karens Replicatior and others may allow versioning as well - I don't know.

You can also get around this problem by remembering to make a copy of the original with a different name before you start the edits or changing the name when saving but this relies on remembering to do it.

 

Seekforever,

Thanks for the precautionary advice.