backup & incremental size greater than original?

hi,

got acronis 9 & always running into problems with my backups filling up hard drive. does it make sense that the total contents of my primary drive is ~45 Gb & the backup plus incrementals equals about 60 Gb?

what's the use, i might as well do a full copy of my whole drive especially if it takes less space than my backups from acronis...my plan was to mirror my primary drive first (so it's a bootable backup) & then save backups to it but all these together makes the disk full after every 1.5 months. my backup drive is about 100Gb & my primary is bigger (i figured i'd put the bigger drive as my primary since it's newer & faster).

please help!!!

can whoever send me a response by email too: byt1977@hotmail.com

thanks!!!!

bill

 

“the backup plus incrementals equals about 60 Gb”
How many INCs? Of course this would make sense if you have 1 FULL and a months worth of INCs.

“can whoever send me a response by email”
Replies are posted to the forum. That way others with similar problems might be helped.

 

ok, i'm talking about 8 increments. increments range from 1 -7 gigs but usually 1 to 3...

so after a while you can't keep all the increments? what do yo do then, do you delete the whole backup & start fresh? (one full & then continue doing increments)...or can you delete the older increments & keep the newer ones (doesn't sound right)...or can you keep the 1st full & then re-start doing increments.

thanks so much for the help.

bill

 

Hello Bill,

I'm afraid you can't delete the older incrementals and keep the newer ones. TI requires a full image plus all the incrementals up to, and including, the point in time you wish to restore from. Note that, as soon as you delete the full image, all the incrementals of that set become orphaned. However, if you then create a new full image using the exact same name as before, the orphaned incrementals will be progressively overwritten by any associated new incrementals.

So, depending on which version of TI you are using, you have a number of options (no particular order of preference):

1. Keep the original full image and start a new set of incrementals. This leaves you with one earlier restore point i.e. the original full image.
2. Delete the original full image and start again using the same file name. You are left with no earlier restore points.
3. Create an Acronis Secure Zone (recommend you do NOT accept the default option to also activate the Acronis Startup Recovery Manager) and let TI automatically manage the number of incremental images in accordance with the logic detailed in the TI User's Guide.
4. Create a series of scheduled backups in order to maintain a predetermined number of previous restore points. Search the forum for suitable examples.
5. If using TI 10.0 Home, utilise its new Backup Location feature to manage the number of incremental images in a set. Be aware of a potential pitfall regarding incorrect selection of the Backup Location directory that is detailed in this previous thread titled <Maximum Backups does not work in TI-10>.

Regards

 

great, thanks very much. i'll try your suggestions. (i've got acronis 9.0)

i just want to make sure- does the size of the backups plus incrementals (~8 increments) sound about right? it's 60 gigs for about 40 gigs of my primary drive. ie the backups are 1/3 larger than all my stuff on my primary drive...

maybe i can add this last thing (perhaps already covered somewhere- sorry): if i want to make my secondary "backup" drive bootable, (in case something goes wrong with my primary)- is it better to completely clone my primary first (which takes up alot of space) or just make it bootable & then hope that i can use acronis to recover material from my "broken" primary drive.

thanks so much for the help; i appreciate it.

bill

 

Hello again Bill,

Sounds as if it could be O.K.

TI creates a "thumbprint" of the actual in-use sector locations and backs up the data contained on those sectors only, along with a copy of the thumbprint and a few bytes of placeholder information representing the sizes of the Windows Pagefile and Hiberfile (if present). When creating an incremental image, TI creates a new thumbprint of the current in-use sectors, compares it with the thumbprint contained in the previous image (be it a full or incremental) and only backs up the data on those sectors that have changed. There are a number of factors that determine the size of each image:

- The level of compression set in TI's Backup Options i.e. None, Normal, High or Maximum (recommend you use Normal)
- The type of files contained on the Disk/Partition being imaged. Multimedia files such as video, mp3, mpeg, etc. are already highly compressed and normally can't be compressed any further by TI's lossless compression algorithm.
- The amount the layout and number of in-use sectors have changed since the previous image was created, either through adding/deleting files or defragging the source hard drive. In fact, defragging the source drive/partition will likely result in an incremental that's almost as large as the original full image.

It depends what you mean by "broken" of course. If it's a hardware failure rather than software corruption that's preventing you booting from your primary drive, then you're not going to be able to retrieve your valuable data anyway .

Whether you "Image" or "Clone" is a matter of personal choice. I myself have chosen the Image route - daily to a dedicated internal HD, weekly to an external USB HD and monthly to DVD RW media. Backups are started from my desktop via batch files (one for imaging to the internal HD and another for the external HD) that copy my current personal data files to the appropriate backup drive prior to TI kicking in. Both internal drives have recently been installed in removable caddies. Therefore, if my primary drive goes belly up, it's simply a matter of swapping the caddies over, booting from the rescue CD and restoring the Disk/Partition image from the external USB HD. Still, each to their own I guess .

Regards

 

thanks! i'm using max compression. why do you recommend normal?

 

Two reasons:

1. Less CPU load.
2. Whilst the image will be slightly larger, it will take less time to create, verify or restore.

Regards