Extremely Large Image Size

OK, it's late and I'm really tired, but I've been fighting this for the past 4 hours and getting no joy. Here's what I got:

I have a 40GB C drive and an 80GB D drive. I'm doing a full image to an externally-connected 160GB USB drive. There's about 8GB of stuff on the C drive and about 11GB on the D drive. The C drive image weighs in at about 5GB (roughly 60% using Normal compression), which is typical of what I've been seeing since I've been using TI8 - about 18 months now. So far, so good. However, the size of the D image is 10GB! When I last imaged this drive about a week ago, it had about 10GB on it and the image itself was well under 7GB. Both drives were cleaned and defragged prior to imaging.

Details: W2K/SP4, Dell GX110, 866 MHz, 512MB RAM, TI8 build 937.

Maybe it's some stupid little thing I've overlooked, maybe not. Can anyone provide some insight on this?

Thanks.

Nick

 

Hello Nick,

Defragging prior to creating a FULL image should have little, if any, affect on the size of the image (total number of in-use sectors remains the same).

So my question is - do you have Windows System Restore set up to monitor that D:\ drive? If so, maybe Windows created a number of additional restore points since you last imaged it.

Regards

 

Hello, Menorcaman.

Thanks for the reply. I wasn't sure if defragging would affect the size of a full image; I had a lot of file activity on the drive so I wanted a relatively "clean" drive to start with. Also, there's no restore on this system.

What I forgot to mention in my original post is what TI8 estimated as the final image size and time required: 6.645GB and 20 minutes. The actual was 9.54GB (sorry, I gave the wrong number before -- told ya it was late), and about 35 minutes.

This is the first time I've run into this. Up until now, TI8's estimates have been quite realistic. For example, the C drive estimates were 4.69GB and 16 minutes; the actual was 4.91GB and about 15 minutes. BTW, I got these numbers by re-running TI8 up to the point of actually creating an image.

I just remembered one other piece of info that may be relevant: when I started this exercise, in the "Selecting Partitions to Image" window of the Create Image Wizard I selected both drives to image. I thought that TI8 would create two separate images. I cancelled out of the process when I saw it would take 35-40 minutes, knowing from experience that was far too long for a single image (this was after it started creating the image). Does TI8 now think D drive is that big?

Regards.

 

Hi again Nick,

No, that should not affect subsequent imaging activity as TI re-analyses all disks/partitions each time it runs.

I should stress that TI's predicted image size and time to complete are rough estimates based on the number of in-use sectors to be imaged and an assumption that there will be a "normal" distribution of application, data and multimedia files. Multimedia files are already heavily compressed so, if your D:\ drive is heavily skewed towards multimedia, TI's size/time estimate will be way off.

Regards