TI2009 Incremental backups almost as big as a full!!!

Hi All.

After a short while, I have noticed that the incremental backups are almost as big as the initiial full backup!

My initial backup was 51GB, the following incremental was 39gb.

I have had similar issues with many of my clients. They are SCREAMING for answers, as they have all upgraded from the free seagate diskwizard (by acronis) to TI2009 to get features like incremental backups and scheduling (unreliable/broken too).

I am developing a very bad reputation for having recomended TI2009!!

Of course acronis refused to respond to requests for refunds before the 30 days was up and now say it is too late! Support has run out too, not that they were of any help. Those useless buggers just ran us in circles until the 30 days ran out.

Why is incremental not working properly? Have we done something wrong?

Rick.

 

TI, and other imaging programs see any moved sector as a change even if the contents of the sector have not changed. What this really means is that defragging a partition can result in what appears to be a large number of changed files. So if you have any scheduled defragger running it will cause large incremenals. Note that I understand that Vista has auto-defragging enabled by default so be sure to check that setting.

If this is the problem, and you want to defrag at some interval then run the defragger once and then make a full backup. Make incrementals up to the time you want to make the next full then defrag, make the full and then continue with incrementals until the next time.

 

Thanks, I wasn't aware that vista defrags automaticly.

I have a clients XP system that does not defrag, and it has bigger than expected incrementals. Any Ideas?

Is there a way to examine an increment to see what it THINKS has changed?

Are there any verbose logs to examine?

Now that I am aware, I will do just that. That should be mentioned in the manual.

Thanks again.

 

Make sure there are not any disk or file system errors (run chkdsk /f, for example).

No.

It is mentioned in the manual. Section 3.2:

 

Hello all,

This situation is very strange. Could you please provide me with the case number via PM? I would check it.

Thank you,

Michael Levchenko

 

I too am having a similar issue, and would like to see what Acronis thinks has changed between backups. This would allow the issue to be investigated further.

For me my setup may be slightly different. I have 4 partitions on my laptop, 3 are Windows system partitions, 1 is for data. Only the 3 system partitions are backed up (XP, Vista and Win 7). The data partition is backed up by a different program, as TI incremental images are too large to send to the server.

My primary OS is the Vista partition, and the other OS partitions are not visible to Vista (I set this). Without booting into any other partitions on the machine, and without making any changes to any files, if I run incremental backups straight after one another I keep getting 12Gb increments compared with a 32Gb total backup.

I did 3 incremental backups, with only 10 mins between each of them, all were 10-12Gb in size. Something v strange is going on here. The backups are not only too large, but its too damn slow to send that volume over the internal network to a server. This issue basically means that we cannot use scheduled backups

 

Update:

I split the backup into 3 so that each OS partition could be backed up by itself. I then compared file sizes for incremental backups to see what was going on (would be sooo much easier if there was a log like in other backup software to show you what it was doing).

Anyway, the Vista partition is being backed up properly, its the Win Xp and Win 7 partitions that are being copied in full during each incremental backup. Going to play with a few settings to see if I can solve that.

 

Hello aet01,

I habe the same problems with the big incremental backups.
Did you get a solution from TI?

 

Hello all,

Thank you for using Acronis True Image

Luminous and us29,

Please see this article for more information.

aet01,

We are awaiting for the case number, could you please send it via PM?

Thank you.

--
Oleg Lee

 

I am using XP Pro and ATI 11 with differential b/u and get the same problem.

Your article leads one to believe this is only an issue with incremental b/u. I also use Outlook email client. I do not defrag often, usually once a month, but within a week my b/u HDD fills and I have to delete about 15 or so differentials. I note that the first couple of differentials are reasonably small, but shortly thereafter jump to the size of the original file or larger.

This was also a problem with ATI 10 and one of the reasons I gave up using Acronis and suffered from lack of an easily restorable b/u when the inevitable crash occurred.

edit: I think I found my problem... another post indicates that using sector by sector results in blank space being imaged. I will see if this is my problem.

 

If System Restore is enabled with its default settings or larger it can cause large jumps in incremental size.

 

I set my restore capacity to about 3%, and I run out of HDD space in less than 2 weeks using differential b/u, and no defragging. I do use Outlook however.