Image size and fragmentation

Hi guys.
I am new to this forum so excuse me if this question has been raised before but i have looked through the forum and have found nothing that answers my question:

Images of my c: partition ar usually above 4.5 GB in size, recently however i noticed that the image size has dropped to 3.9GB. I don't know exactly when the size reduction happened, but the only change i have made to the c-partition recently is that i have installed pefectdisk 7 and defragmented the partition.

Could the defragmentation have caused the image-size to become smaller??

I use Acronis True Image 8 (build 771). No compression. The images are full-backups (i.e. NOT incremental). I have checked the images and they are ok.

 

Hello Aoleon,

Thank you for using Acronis True Image (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/).

Acronis True Image creates the backup of your hard drive (or partition) rather than just a backup of files. That is why when you defragmented your drive the new size of the image became smaller. There is nothing to worry about, this is normal situation.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

Thanks for the quick reply.
BTW this software is just great!!!

 

Hello Aoleon,

Thank you for your warm words. We are always glad to hear our products could help people.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

I don't know about others but I always defrag my hard drive and make sure it is as defragged as possible before I make an image. It has always seemed like a sensible thing to do especially when my defragger shows all the data on the hard drive nicely packed at one end of the drive and one or two small bits of data at the other end of the drive! I figure that in making the image in such circumstances Acronis would have to include all the empty space in between the two parts of the hard disk where the data is stored therefore making the image a lot bigger than when the data is all packed in one area of the hard drive as happens as a result of a defrag.

 

Hello mareke,

Acronis True Image includes in the image file only sectors that contain data. It doesn't matter where the sectors are located on your hard drive.

However if you create an incremental image after defragmentation it will be of almost the same size as the full back up. This happens because during the defragmentation a lot of data is moved therefore a lot of sectors change their content.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman