new to TI, have a few ?'s... please help

Hey, thanx for choosing to see what I have to say. I have searched the forums for a few of the things that I want to know, but I didn't find all I needed to know. Ok, I made the emergency rescue disk awhile back, and last week I made a full image of my C drive, Today I tried the INCREMENTAL BACKUP and was confused by the outcome. By the time that the INCREMENTAL was done, I had 3 gig left on my pc, which it stopped one time and said that I had ran out of space and I had to delete some stuff... so now I have a 22gig FULL from a week or so ago after reinstalling windows xp and got ALL of the basic things, and important things that I wanted... a 44Gig Incremental that says number 2, and a 4 gig Incremental that says it is number 3.... so that is almost 70 Gig of space for ONE backup, and the first Incremental that I have done so far...

One of my ?'s is... can I remove the full file (22 gig) and keep the two 44 gig, and 4 gig incremental files? Or do i have to keep all of them?? This really didn't make much sense to me... I mean.. why not just do a FULL backup again, and that would be MUCH smaller...

Also, I have a cd burner, and a dvd burner.... eventually I was goin to put a fill backup on a DVD so I would have one outside of the pc incase something happens... which really seems safer to me
I know that when you go to make a backup you can choose to make it ALL one file, or break it down into 4GIG increments for example... BUT... now that I have made it ALL ONE FILE... can it be broke into different pieces to go onto a dvd, OR NO? This is important for me to know for when I go to put one on DVD.

I am using TI version 8 and I had read that you can shedule backups... I was just looking for this feature but it didn't jump out at me... where is this? Is it part of the Secure Zone or whatever...

Which brings me to the last ? that I can think of.. RIGHT NOW
What exactly is Secure Zone?? I clicked on it a sec ago to see what it said, but I didn't understand fully what was goin to be done... it was goin to create a partition on my hard drive?? And I can put how much space is allowed for that drive? I'm guessing... from the way I understand it so far... is that the partition that it makes is ONLY for putting the Backups on? And what is the point of that? IS it Necessary? Right now I have the backup that was made put on my c Drive... is that what I'm suppose to do?

If someone can PLEASE help me out with these few things I would GREATLY appreciate it. And I will post more if I can think of more ?'s that I need to ask. I know there was something else.. i just can't think of it right now.
Thanx so much.. and have a good day

 

Your post is a bit confusing, but I'll try to address some points.

1) The Secure Zone is a special hidden partition dedicated for ATI backups, and nothing else. It also gives the ability to press F11 on bootup to go into "rescue" mode without requiring a boot CD. I choose not to use the Secure zone because the F11 functionality is not important to me, and I back up to NAS these days anyway.

2) An incremental backup is no good without the full backup used as its "base", or any of the incremental backups created between then and the first full backup.

3) An incremental should never be larger than a full backup. In the extreme case where every sector on your hard drive has change, it will be as big as a full backup.

4) If you are backing up your "C:" partition, the image for that partition needs to go on another partition or device. I can't really understand what you're saying, but it almost appears that you are trying to image your C: partition to your C: partition, which I thought would be impossible.

5) If you want to store your images on DVD, follow my instructions for creating a bootable rescue DVD set. If you are not concerned about making it bootable, you can just specify a file split size of 635MB and skip the rest of the instructions. That will make your data fit nicely on a DVD (or CD).

6) If you already have a backup image that is over 1.9GB, it won't fit on an ISO9660 filesystem DVD. UDF DVDs will take larger files, but even then you're limited to the size of the DVD. You can't take images larger than that and split them up and expect ATI to be able to restore them natively.