Complete Disk Image is HUGE! Please help.

Hello,

I am pretty new to ATI 2009, but I seem to be having a disk image problem. I used the bootable disk (since I have ATI installed on my desktop PC) to make a disk image of the hard drive (120GB 7200RPM) on my laptop (Dell Latitude D630, Core2Duo, 2 GB RAM, WinXP SP3). I used my NAS as the destination drive. With ATI booted up, I selected the "Create image of entire disk or partition" option. In the options, I also selected the maximum amount of compression. So of the 120GB hard drive, I am using approx. 15GB. Well the image created took forever (+6 hours) and ended up being a whopping 100GB! A message appeared indicating the task had completed successfully. Note, the sector by sector option was NOT checked. Am I doing something wrong? Why was the file so huge when I'm only using about 15GB on the drive? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

With only 15 GB used on the drive, the image should be 9-12 GB roughly. So something is definitely wrong.

If there are errors on the drive, TI may default to the sector by sector backup. This might also happen if the Linux drivers of the Rescue CD are a bad match to the disk controller on the computer.

Run CHKDSK d: /R on the drive (where d: is the drive letter) to be sure there are no errors. Then run the Accessory/System Tools DiskCleanUp to get rid of any junk. Finally, defragment the drive with the Defragmenter tool in the same place.

Delete the huge backup and repeat the backup Wizard. Double check that you are selecting the drive you want and that you are selecting Normal or higher compression.

 

Thanks for the reply jmk94903. It is possible something could have went wrong on the drive, however very unlikely. This laptop was purchased in Feb. of 2009 so it is still fairly new. I have only installed WinXP and a few misc. programs so defragmenting the drive wouldn't really be practical. I will try re-running the disk image with normal compression. And you are correct, when I am prompted to select what type of compression, ATI gives an estimate of the image file size that will be created. It was approx. 9 GB. Another reason that I am confused to have a 100 GB image file upon completion. I will also make sure to run disk cleaner. Also, this is the only drive on the laptop.

 

Hello all,

Thank you for using Acronis True Image

knight1fox3 ,

Please download Acronis Report utility available here and run it, create a report and attach it to your post.

We will check the hard disk partition structure.

Thank you.

--
Oleg Lee

 

Reporting back from my earlier posts, I re-ran the imaging using normal compression. I also used a different laptop which had roughly 36 Gb used on the hard drive. I was able to create a 30 Gb image in just about an hour or so. I trust this is more typical of what can be expected when imaging a drive (depending on the size of course).

 

Yes, that makes more sense. The size of the backup depends on the type of files on the drive. Photo, music and video files are already compressed, so they won't compress in the backup. That may account for the backup being 30GB rather than 20-25GB which would be expected for more compressible files.

As far as defragmenting, you might be surprised to see that a new computer with only a couple of programs still can be defragmented. The Windows updates, etc. will create lots of fragmented files, and new computers actually get a lot of updates since the image used to load the operating system is often many months old.