Created image larger than original

Have two external USB drives, both are identical manufacturer, identical capacity (300 GB), partitioned and formatted the same (full drive partition, NTFS). When using ATI to image the source to the destination, scheduled backup fails every time, because space runs out (source drive is nearly full, but not quite). These drives are used by a photographer, so the content on the source drive is all images (JPGs and RAW) in individual folders. I saw another post in this forum saying that if the source is heavy on image or other compressed files, I should choose "no compression" in the options when I back up. I tried that; but backup still fails due to lack of space. Any ideas?

 

I’ll ask what seems to be the obvious:
How much disk space is in use on the source?

If "no compression" doesn't work, I'd start with the lowest setting and try working my way up.

 

Greetings Ganton,

Are you sure that while creating this task, you Un-ticked the System Drive, usually C:\? While creating a Drive Image of a small partition today, I was surprised at how long TI estimated the time remaining, and then I remembered -- even though I thought I had only told TI to create an Image of one partition on my 3rd internal HD, the system drive was ticked by default, even though I didn't notice it on the options screen. This might explain the size discrepancy.

I'm also a photographer, and my tests have shown that TI does not compress Photographs, either .jpgs or RAW files, even if I have told TI to compress the image. At least, there is no lossy compression used, and my Photographs came thru intact, with Compression settings from None to Heavy. The processing time may increase with higher levels of compression, but, if you have other, compressible data on the drive, this may also free up some space. As always, I would encourage you to verify these on your own system.

Regards,

 

Several questions need to be answered:
1. What partition are you trying to image? C, or a data partition D, E..., a USB drive?

2. How much space is used on the partition you are trying to image?
You can right-click on the drive letter in My Computer or Windows Explorer and select Properties to find the used space.

3. Are you sure you selected the USB drive as the target for the backup?

4. How much space is used on the Target USB drive before the image is started?

This will let us really be more helpful.

 

Hello ganton,

In a previous thread some two years ago, the consensus of opinion was that it's best if the destination drive had around 1.5 times the space available as the used space on the source drive. However, it's possible that bad sectors/corrupt file system is confusing TI's free space calculation. Therefore it might be worth opening a Command Prompt and running chkdsk X: /r on your source and destination drives (substitute X for the actual drive letter being tested).

Regards

 

Hello, and thanks everyone for your replies. Sorry I waited 'til now to reply; hope you'll all see this. To address each of you in turn:
-TheWeaz: I'm working from my memory here, but as I recall, all but about 11 GB was filled on the source drive, and even though the destination drive showed something like 36 KB (?) left, that obviously was not enough space to finish the backup. Huge difference.
-Christopher NC: Yes, I had double-checked that only the proper source and destination drives' letters/partitions were checked before running the image. I know the system drive usually gets ticked by default. I had already tried the imaging *with* compression, and that didn't work either.
-jmk94903:
1. As I said above, I was sourcing a 300 GB, external, USB drive to a destination 300 GB, external, USB drive with identical everything, and the source was nearly full (see above).
2. See above.
3. Yes, I selected the correct drives for source and target.
4. No space was used on the destination except for that required for an NTFS partition using the entire drive.
-Menorcaman: Why should the destination need half again as much space as the source? Both these drives are nearly new, but I'll try running chkdsk on them, and see what I get. That'll probably take about three days on a 300 GB drive, so I may not get back to the forum any time soon!

 

Hello Ganton,

If my interpretation of your problem is correct you are using a 300GB USB drive as the source of about 289 GB of data. The target drive is another 300GB USB drive.

When I tried to copy a fairly large file, 15GB, directly from one USB drive to another USB it did not work. However copying it first to an internal drive and then sending this copy to the target USB drive worked with no problem at all.

Regardless of any compression that you may choose you could only get one image on the destination drive so why not just do a straight copy without using TI ?

As I have found this may not work directly though it is worth a try. I presume you don't have 300+ GB spare capacity on your computer to do a two stage copy process. In which case can you do a temporary mount of the target drive as an internal slave drive and then put it back in its USB housing when finished.


Xpilot

 

Hi ganton,

A bit of brain fade on my part I'm afraid. It was in fact the Acronis Secure Zone that needed to be at least 1.5 times the size of the image being created into it. Apologies for the confusion.

Still worth carrying out chkdsk X: /r on both drives though.

Regards