Paragon B&R 2012 Differential Size Problem

Hi Folks

I am currently testing out Paragon B&R.

I created a full backup which was around 60gb. Then an hour or so later I decided to test the differential backup, thinking as I had made very little change to the HD that it would be small.

However it estimates the Differential backup as 53GB.

I have tried this under both win xp and win 7. I am backing up to a partition on an external HD that is running via esata.

What is going on or what am I doing wrong?

Fred

 

Hi Folks

Further to my previous post, I know what Paragon is doing. It is not doing a Differential Backup but another Full Backup. Why?

Fred

 

The estimates the Differential backup number of 53GB is the space required on the archive drive to make the backup, the program doesn't know in advance the number of changes that you made to your system, it has to do a complete system scan and determinant which part is different and saved and which part remain the same and to be skipped.

The final archive file size will be significantly smaller then the original.

 

Hi Cincinnatijack

There were very few changes made between the full backup and the differential. The archive for the differential backup is the same size as the full backup.

That is my point, it is not doing a diff backup but a second full backup. Why?

Fred

 

The only other think that may have happened is that the system defragged the drive between the two backups, check the windows 7 defrag setting to see if your system is defragging in the background.

 

Just as an FYI, which has been posted here previously in another thread, though I cannot for the life of me remember where, there is a bug with the differential backups, that the comparison is being done on the disk level when it should be done on the partition level. The current work around for the issue is when choosing what to compare in the differential instead of choosing the entire disk, choose only the partitions and the differential will be a bit more accurate.

 

I have had this problem with every B&R version I've run for the last 3 years. The proposed solution makes no sense to me - I choose the partition exactly one time, at the start of the "Wizard". I don't see any point later on during setting up the cyclic differential image backup where I would select a partition to "compare". The first backup is fine, sometimes the differentials run OK for weeks, then at some point it starts reporting that it will use space much larger than the full size of the partition. And it really does write data that is much larger than the source partition. The only solution I've found is to delete the scheduled job and wipe out my backups and start a new cycle. At one time I thought it had something to do with a USB flash drive changing the drive order or something like that, but now I see it happening even with no USB drive in.