Incremental back up too large.

I did a full backup of drive C: The following month I needed to do a full restore, and did same. All is well.

After a week, I wanted to back up again, so I did an incremental. The resultant backup about doubled the backup size.

Should I have just made a new back up rather than an incremental at this time? If so why didn't it work?

Thanks,

Ben

 

Where do you store the image of C? If it is on C, that's the problem.

Incrementals of the boot partition are usually large, half to two-thirds the size of a full backup. If you defrag, the incremental will be even larger. For that reason, I only make full backups of the boot partition.

 

Backup is stored on Extrnal USB drive. Diskeeper is scheduled to run when the screensaver is running. Maybe that explains it.

Thanks,

Ben

 

so if you defrag an image file on any drive it will become larger?

 

That does indeed happen. TI apparently doesn't really look at the archive bit of your files, it looks at your data sector by sector and considers even movement to be a "file change". -- therefore, an extensive defrag will cause a large incremental or differential backup.

 

Just to help me clarify this....I'm hopefully going to be a new user of ATI.....

I'm planning on using ATI to backup/image my 80gb C: drive to another internal 300gb hard drive. I've partitioned the 300gb drive into two 150 drives. I'm going to use one of those partitions for storing images of my operating system 80gb C: drive. I'm planning on doing incremental backups once or twice a month to my 150gb backup drive H:.

I have two questions: which one or both is correct?

1. If I defrag my C: drive frequently and do incremental backups my backups will become huge? So I should not defrag my C: drive after I begin imaging?

2. Or is it, if I defrag my images on my backup drive H: those files will become huge? So I should never defgrag my backup H: drive?

Thanks

 

From reading a few other posts, it looks like the correct answer is 1, if I frequently defrag my C: my incremental images will continue to grow, because the data has been rearranged and looks different than before, is that correct?

If that is the case, then I should either;

1. only defrag 2-3 times a year
or
2. don't do as many incremental backups

Correct

 

I believe you have the gist of it -- yes, every time you defrag, every sector/cluster that was moved relative to where it was in the full backup (or the preceding incremental) will be included in the incremental backup.

It does kinda suck, IMO.

I know that I probably defrag more frequently than probably is worth it -- I'm just kinda fanatic, I guess. So, I choose not to do a lot of incremental backups.

My solution is to use another application which keeps an up to date snapshot of my operating system and programs at 2-day, 4-day, and weekly intervals. So I have little need for incrementals of my operating system.
I happen to have all of my and my family members' data files (My Document folders) replicated once a day onto all three machines in our home network. I'm almost certain I'm kind of unusual in that respect and maybe it's not that useful for you to know but there it is.

Perhaps, you can find some compromise like less frequent backups, at least backing up before you defrag, and perhaps defragging less frequently ?

Sorry I don't have the best solution for you !

 

Thanks so much crofttk. I sent you a pm, so as not to get the thread off topic.

 

No, an existing image file won't change in size due to defragging.

We are saying that a new Incremental backup will be larger if the drive is defragged after the original full backup is made.

 

Agreed. I kind of glossed over that point because I wasn't certain thehotrod actually meant one incremental backup image continuing to grow.