Backup Image size?

Hi folks!

I'm sort of a newbie with this stuff and have a dumb question. I'm trying to create an image of a 250GB hard with actual data of only 20GB.

Is my image size going to be 250GB or 20GB? If it's the former, then I need to reconsider where I'm going to have this image saved.

Thanks
Al

 

The Image will be between 60% to 70% of the used space. If most of your data consists of music or video files they do not compress in the image making process and your Image size will be larger.

 

Whew! Thanks DwnNDrty!

The image is building now (50 min to go) and the "size" reads 239GB. Scared the crap out of me.

I've been working on this image for the last 2 days and people are already starting to think I was laggin; don't need this part of the process to slow things down even more.

Thanks again.
Al

 

That's seems too long a time ... usually you can estimate about 1Gb/min. What are you using for the destination for the Image?

 

External USB drive.

 

Are you running the backup from within Windows or from the Rescue CD (Linux environment)?

 

If the 50 min was the initial time estimate, wait until you have at least 3 green progress bars showing then check the time. The time shown at the start is very inaccurate.

 

The size shown is the original data/partiton size, which will be reduced in the backup as it performs compression while backing up.

 

Remember, an IMAGE backup doesn't know what's data and what's not; it just blindly copies sectors. Of course, it compresses, so if a bunch of successive sectors are all zeros, it can compress it a lot. Unfortunately, some formatting doesn't erase sectors, just creates file table entries.

If you run the solution I proposed at https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=167594
you may find backups reduced considerably in size.