No compression??

Suddenly I noticed I was really low on space on my backup drive, so I did some checking.

The files that I back up total about 180GB.

I do a full image backup to an 500 GB external drive

The compression is set to normal and the estimated file size is about 100 GB, which is what I would expect..... BUT ...it isnt getting compressed... it's about the same size, ie Mybackup.tib is about 180 GB. Why?

 

The later (by date) Images are less ... did you remove some files? If you have a lot of picture and movie files, then those are already in a compressed format so they will not be further compressed. And the estimate given by True Image is just that - an estimate. Still I would expect to see at least a little compression to make the file size less than the uncompressed size.

 

Those latter images are incrementals...and again they are way too big. Something is amuck.

Of the 180GB, about 90 GB it is jpg, mp3, wav or flac ; the other 110 GB is 'conventional' computer files. I would expect some compression on the latter.

I'm going to do another full backup, with 'high' compression (Acronis estimate is 92GB) and we'll see what that results in.

 

A fresh full backup, with high compression, got me down to 150 GB, so thats in the right direction.

I then thought that since I abck up my fles (as direct file copies) anyway, to two other drives, why not jsut so a full image without the uncompressable file ( ie full image but excluding mp3 and jpg).

When I tried that, I got error message E0070021 - unable to create volume snapshot. I posted a note on this for assistance...

 

Hello Mediaman,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are sorry for the delayed response.

Please see my answer in this thread you created.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov

 

I found that Windows Vista had been putting many GB of Restore Points (?) or some such on one of my external hard drives. Thus it reported 100 GB used when I had 5 GB of data on it. I used Disk Cleanup to elimnate all but the most recent Restore Point, and it took care of the matter.

I have no idea why it happened, or if it will again. But, you might try the Disk Cleanup. It won't bother your data.

 

Excellent point re controlling the space used by System Restore. If you use Disk Cleanup, it appears to remove all previous Restore points except the lastest one. While this is great to free up space, its a little too close for comfort for me (as once or twice System Restore did help on reboots) so I investigated further.

Turns out you can specify how much space you want System Restore to use. It needs a minimum of 300MB but will use much more if you let it. I read in the past that one can control the maximum size (or the maximum age) via a Regsitry setting change, but there is a very simple way to view and control the size of the Restore points, as explained here:
http://www.5starsupport.com/faq/vista-system-restore.htm

Mine was using 45 GB of space! So I set the max down to half of that for now, ie 20GB max ( only 500GB hard drive). I'll leave it there for a while and see how the image backups are affected.

As well, excluding the compressed user files ( jpg, wav, mp3 etc) will also help.

MM

 

You can control th amount of space that sys restore uses for resotre points. the less space, the fewer restore points. I think the basic 8 or 10% default comes from the days when hdisks were much smaller.

Go into the control panel and somewhere under performance or such is System Restore and then there should be a System Restore Settings you can select. Then for each dirve you can highlight the drive and slide the marker over to increase or decrease the percentage of diskspace that sys restore is allowed to use. I find 3% works jsut fine. If I need more resotre points than that -- going even farther back in time -- then my machine is probably so messed up that sys restore isn't going to fix it anyway.

Anyway, if yous set the space Systrestore can use to somethingmuch smaller than the default, you won't have to bother with doing deletions; Windows will manage it for you.

 

I'm sure you are correct re Control Panel, but I could not find the setting.

 

Open system restore. Bottom left of the first page is the settings button where you can set limits for each drive or partition.
Left to its own devices in XP system restore can take up to 12% of a drive.

I used to make the restore capacity so small that it would only take about 3 or 4 restore points. I then realised that sometimes when installing the odd program on a MS update Tuesday several more restore points could be useful.
So I now allow more space for SR points and when things are not busy and I know I will not need them I run the Windows disk clean up to reduce them to one. I do this just before a scheduled back up is due to run.

Xpilot

 

I'm on Vista. I dont think it has those type of settings in a windows screen.
At least its not obvious where it is.

The command lines do the job however - albeit also not user friendly.

 

The easy to use option that was in XP is gone from Vista as Windows becomes more Apple-like -- things are decided for you.

Note that Vista doesn't use uses the registry keys

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\SystemRestore

And any changes to these keys will have no effect on how System Restore functions in Visata. These keys supposedly are only for backwards compatibility with some XP scripts.

However, it is possible to change the space allocated to system restore in Vista. Consider the steps listed here:

http://vistasupport.mvps.org/decrease_storage_space-allocated_to_system_restore.htm

The first link has better instructions but the second link has an imortnat note that the maxsize cannot be below 300MB.


and again here:

http://www.ghacks.net/2007/04/25/change-the-system-restore-size-in-windows-vista/