Incremental backup - determination of what is causing large size

this was originally posted under "Differential backup - File differences between two backups" however i just remembered that i do incremental backups.

anyway, the same type of question is asked - is there a way to look at the incremental backup and determine that the size is due to sector changes related to particular files.

i did an incremental backup a week after the former and the backup size was about 3GB. i know i installed a package that was about 500MB but i'd like to figure out where the rest of the space is from. if i know this i may be able to exclude certain files/folders from the backups.

thanks!

 

First question: Did you do any defragmenting prior to the incremental backup?

 

no defragmenting was done.

like i said earlier i know that i installed a new version of a piece of software (which deleted the prior version as well). and of course i update several times a week spyware, anti-virus signatures, etc. no big microsoft updates were applied.

i suppose that there could be some files left over in a temp directory but that would still not explain the size.

if there was a tool that coalesced all of the sectors written to the incremental backup by filename (i.e. sectors 5 & 10 belong to file A, sectors 1000-2000 were changed and belong to file B, etc.) then i would have a shot at figuring out caused the increase.

and as a result i may be able to exclude some files and/or folders. i no i already exclude some VMware folders because of this but in this case the increase was on the C drive.

 

Hello gwa000,

Thank you for your interest in Acronis True Image

Recently there were discussions on the forum concerning large Incremental backup archives despite of the fact that no defragmentation or any other operations which could lead to sector changes been made. There is no definite answer what is the source of the issue. The question is what do you select when creating next incremental backup? So the thing is that kevinkar (see this thread) probably found the solution. He said that the issue has gone after he selected the last incremental backup archive not full one when creating next incremental backup.

Also can you please specify the exact title of the program and the build number?

Best regards,
--
Dmitry Nikolaev

 

by title i'm guessing that you mean which program.

Program: Acronis True Image Home
Version: 11.0 (Build 8053)

in answer to your (Acronis support) question, when i do an incremental backup i select the original full backup, NOT the last incremental backup. the rationale is, is that i have a task set up for a full backup and one for an incremental backup. after i've made a full backup i then do incremental backups for a few months. these are done manually and usually once a week. by using the original backup file name i simply change the starting time without having to specify a different backup file (incremental).

as i stated in the original note is if there was a utility to compare two incremental backups one could see which files were consuming space.

BTW, i originally posted this note thinking at the time that i was doing differential backups:

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=239111

the response i got was that because the backups are sector based then it is impossible to report who is using the space. even though one does a disk backup you can still restore individual files can't you?

couldn't those changed sectors (the ones that are being backed up) be correlated to who "owns it" from the FAT or NTFS. in other words for each sector that is backed up report who owns it.

# sectors total file
backed up sectors file name
---------- -------- ---------
10 10 new_file.txt
3 1000 database.mdb

Total: 13 sectors backed up (this should equal roughly the size of the backup minus any overhead that Acronis uses in the backup file).

if i see a huge number of sectors backed up this should correlate to activity done on the system. and if i see files whose sectors are constantly being backed which i don't care about then they could be excluded.