How large a drive do I need to back up a 1 TB main drive?

I'm using Acronis True Image version 10 at normal compression. I want to get a large, 1TB hard drive and at least two somewhat smaller back-up drives (if possible).

In order to fully back up a 1 terabyte hard drive using normal compression, how large should the back-up drive be?

Thanks in advance for your help.

LH

 

That depends on the amount of used space on the 1TB and on the "make up" of the used space. If you have a lot of movies, pics, and mp3 files, those will not compress any more as they are already in a compressed format. But generally with Normal compression, you can expect the used space to compress to about 60% to 70%.

 

OK.

A lot of my stuff does consist of files that are already compressed, so that's food for thought.

 

Since you should save more than one or two backup images in order to have older backups to fall back on if necessary, it's often useful for the backup drive to be larger than the drive being backed up if you expect to fill most of it. Hmmm.... With a 1 TB main drive, I guess a good size for a backup drive would be at least 1.5 TB. Of course, that need for older backups is most important for the boot drive. It's usually less important for data files which can't be infected by viruses.

You might want to partition your main drive into a C: (Boot) partition for Windows and all programs and rapidly changing data such as email and a D: ( Data) partitition for your music, photo and video files. These can be backed up just by copying if they don't change rapidly, or by a file backup utility if they do.

The C: boot partition can be backed up by True Image. That backup might be only 5-10 GB in size without all the media data. Then, a cheap 500GB USB drive would be more than large enough for many C: backups, and a 1TB external drive would be fine for one backup of just the D: data files.