Would My thinking be correct? I'm almost sure about it, but I thought what the hell, get a confirmation or two Backing up for the first time using the Incremental Scheme would do this? Firstly create a full back up of my system partition ( as I set it to disks and partitions, not whole system) and then on, on a daily basis, say at 12:00 am each day, Acronis will backup automatically, but only the changes made since the Full backup, So if Avira and Skype used 748MB of space during installation, this is how big the incremental will be ? Also should I exclude the temp folders or leave them as is to be backed up also?
Hi DVD+R First you need to understand the difference between Differential backup and Incremental backup. Differential backup will always be comparing the current system state to the original full image, hence you can delete intermediate backups in the chain. An incremental backup compares the current system with the last incremental, so you can't delete any intermediate backups. Also you can't fully estimate the size of an incremental based on what might have been added or subtracted. If you add nothing, but defrag the disk that can create a large incremental. Finally if you are truly using the image function, you probably can't exclude folders. You get the whole partition as is. Pete
In addition to what Pete says above, whens apps are using an "image" function, some are able to actually exclude files/folders from the image (not sure about Acronis) but it's done in a very unnatural way... by ZEROing the content of the actual file upon imaging. This allows for a very compressed version of that ZERO length file in the image (basically only a file entry point), but produces a bogus file upon restoration (this is usually how they handle the Windows PageFile which most imagers do not image). Some imagers that do this usually provide a mechanism (batch file after restoration, etc.) that rids your restored image of these ZEROed files. And remember, even if your system is doing nothing between INCREMENTALs, normal Windows housekeeping (file and content indexing, etc.) will add about 500mB to 1gB of changes to an INCREMENTAL image daily (my experience).
Exactly the point I was going to make if you hadn't beat me to it. Also, depending on the product, a defrag can make a huge differential or incremental if the imaging is based on the file's location on the disc.
