Where is my free space?

I have a 300gb external drive used to backup my main computer. I use
Acronis True Image to make an image weekly, overwriting the existing image
each time. I also have a variety of other backup data on there. The Image
is about 85gb, and the additional data is another 70gb or so. However my
300 gb drive reports only 40 gb free. My 300gb gross volume nets 279gb
usable space, subtracting the 155gb of actual data (85+70) says I should
have 124gb available. The fact that 124-40=84 leads me to believe that the
image is using (or at least holding) 170gb of space for its 85 gb backup.
Disk cleanup shows no files in the recycle bin. Why is that 85gb not being
freed up when the image file is overwritten?

 

I should also clarify that each backup is a "full, uncompressed."

 

Hello jed

Just a thought but is your image created as a single .tib file or has it been split into a number of smaller ones? If it's the latter then you need to be aware of a slight "gotcha" when overwriting split images. For further details please check out my thread <here>.

Regards