Incremental backup seems to make full backup

Discussion in 'Acronis True Image Product Line' started by edziu42, Apr 8, 2009.

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  1. edziu42

    edziu42 Registered Member

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    I made a full backup of my C: drive to an external drive O:
    Several weeks later I made an incremental backup according to instructions received from Acronis Tech support. Again, several weeks later I made another incremental backup. Everything seemed OK until the other day I tried another incremental backup and received an error message that the drive was full. I then checked my capacities and my c: drive has a total capacity of 144GB with 83GB used and 72GB free. My external O: drive has a capacity of 156GB with 153GB used and only 2.8GB free. How can this be? Shouldn't my backup be pretty much the same as my C: drive? The backup is nearly double the original.

    What's up?
     
  2. jmk94903

    jmk94903 Registered Member

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    How big are the three files? (Full, and both incrementals)

    Do you do defragmentation? If this is a Vista system, Vista defrags in the background. When a drive is defragmented, the incremental will be almost the size of the full backup image because many sectors are changed.

    Incremental backups of boot drives are always larger than you might expect because Windows opens and closes so many files during normal operation. This causes files to move around, so the incrementals are larger than just the new files added.

    Your full image backup is probably 50-65GB. A larger backup drive would allow you to store more than one full backup plus several incrementals.
     
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