Incremental Backup size

I recently restored my plain windows xp installation image(*1) and after that i installed some basic softwares and then tried to create an incremental backup over the image(*1). The inital image size was 1.3 gb. the newly created incremental backup image size is 1.7gb ..is it the way ATI works? why the size is so huge? if it only backing up the changed data it should not be of this size.. I am confused about this...whats the use of using incremental backup then?

FYI..I havent done any defragmentation in the hard disk after restoring the initial image..

And also whats that differential backup means..is it the same as incremntal..the help document is very unclear about what is the difference between these two (incremental and differential backups)..

Thank You

 

“I recently restored my plain windows xp installation image(*1)”
I don’t believe that the sectors will be restored to the same place. Therefore, most of the sectors will be included in the INC you ran.

 

You believe correctly and you can also add any changes Windows might have made in doing optimization.

Basic rule seems to be to do a Full not an incremental as the first backup after a Restore.

 

Thanks for the answers. Its very odd to take the backup of the restored image once again..I understand how acronis works for backing up the partition or disk. if i take the image by backing up with files and folders option in acronis, can i avoid the second time backup of the image after restoring the image. Assume that i will take care of backing up and restoring MBR manually using some other tools.What will be the size of incremental backup if i am running any live defragmentation tools. Will it be same in both the cases(Partition, disk backup, files and folders backup). Please someone clarify..as a starter i am finding difficulty in choosing the best effective method to follow. The help file seems to be suggesting very less in regard of this. There should be of proper guidance and explanation of how to use the product features effectively.

And one more question, how does the files and folder backup option work if i do incremental backup. Whether it take the backup of the files based on the timestamp of the files or some other method. If it is based on timestamp method assume that some files have changed and the timestamp is not changed, what will happen to that file.. will acronis take the backup of that file or will it omit that?. since some of the softwares i use just modify the files and keeps the timestamp same as when it is created. Please not that the file size is fixed always only the content is changed without changing the timestamp. What acronis will do if i take the partition image. In this case the sectors are reserverd for this container file with placeholder values and when i use the software it modifies the placeholder. Will acronis detect that changes and take the incremental backup of that sectors? I had this problem when i was using some other backup software. so i have to take the backup of that kind of files manually every day or force the backup software use better comparison method using checksum. Use of checksum dragged down the backup process.

 

“Its very odd to take the backup of the restored image once again”
How is TI to know that the drive you told it to backup was ‘restored’? To TI, it’s just data on a drive. Data that has changed, at least as far as where it's located.
AFAIK, the Files/Folders backup also uses TIs ‘snapshot’ technology. So backing up, restoring and backing up again would produce pretty much the same results – a large INC/DIFF image.

 

Re: Incremental Backup size - Files and Folders

No it is not like that...I tried it..It doesn't work that way for files and folders. Only for disk and partition it works that way. If you specify files and folders the incremental backup size seems to be not bigger than the first backup image.

There is a small problem with acronis, if you use files and folder option for incremental backup the files only changed in size or timestamp are getting backed up. If there is a file with the same size and the timestamp with only the contents changed..acronis doesn't backup that file in the incremental backup. Is there anyway to force acronis to change the comparison method to md5 checksum or somthing like that while doing incremental backup for files and folders.

 

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=780075&postcount=5

 

Thanks for the ref.
If that is the case why ATI behaves differently for incremental backup of a file with the same size and timestamp with different content. I mean with the incremental files and folder option selected it is not recording the changes of that file. Hope someone from acronis clarifies it.

 

Use only image backup, files and folders is much, much, ..., much slower, and you cannot be guanteed thal all files will bebacked up, nor can you restore a stem from files and folders backup.

Incremental backup, in TI 9, has been much faster in recent builds.

Backing up based on time stamps, even file size, is not entirely reliable.
See the disussion in http://www.standards.com/index.html?CompareDrives
for the Attributes and Content programs.