Question re: appending images

Hi,

I just recently purchased True Image. I just appended to an image which worked fine, but then I thought of attempting another append immediately afterwards thinking that it would say all is up to date, however, it actually went and took another 6-7 minutes to append to the image.

Is this normal? I would have thought that if nothing has changed between making an image and then making another one, then it would recognise this and not actually try and append anything. Or at the very least append an extremely small amount of data. It was definately an append and not a fresh image.

Any ideas why this is the case.. eg. is it supposed to do this?

I have Winxp Pro and just installed SP2 immediately before appending to the image I already had, then once the image was finished, I immediately tried the same thing.

Thanks
Geoff

 

What size was the incremented file? I did a similar thing as test and found tha tthe appended file was the same size as the original - 2.1GB, give or take a few MBs, hence it took the same time as the full backup.

Did another test where I had actually installed a couple of small apps and this time it created a smaller incremented image file but it still took nearly as long as the full backup - I guess it is having to "find and compare" what has changed.

I was surprised that the file was 500MB but the apps only added less than 50MB to the partition. 500Mb seems a lot for only 50MB of added data but I'm still happy as I will still save loads of space using the increment facility.

 

This doesn't make sense.... let's say you do a backup and it's 2 gigs... you now add a 50 meg program, should not the additional backup, be a size of only 50 megs or even less ? if it also compresses the file ?

If the appended file is as large as the original backup, then it just doesn't make any sense... one might as well just delete the original complete backup and start again, and you'll end up with only one file instead of 2, and actually save space.

I just don't understand incremental backups perhaps, but if it is an incremental backup, then in theory is should not be anywhere near the size of the original... why would somebody in their right mind want to keep 2 files on their backup drive using up way more space, when you can just delete the original and redo it.... makes sense doesn't it ??

 

Incrementals work just fine here.
My full backups are around 3GB, while my incrementals are under 100MB.

 

The first incremental was around 900 megs, but the second time I did it, the file size seems to be the size of the original.. eg. 4 gigs.

Rather weird.

 

Does the 900MB image verify?
If the "base" image is corrupt in any way, then ATI will create a new full image rather than doing an incremental.

 

How do you check the integrity of the 900mb file.. If I choose Check image, it checks the entire image?

Apart from that, I can explore the image when I choose the incremented file, and it also said it was successful both times when I appended.

 

I have the same issue, my incremental back upas are the same size as the original full back. I must admit this is not what I was expecting since it appears the ATI instead of appending the incremental back up to the full back is making a new full copy irrespective of the instructions I give it.

Does anyone have a suggestion as to where the problem might lie?

 

It was mentioned in another thread that the user was defragmenting the hard drive between backups. This would cause the incrementals to be just as large as the full backups. Are you doing defrags?

 

I'm not doing any defrags between appends.. in fact, i'm not doing anything.. from the moment it gave the dialog box that said it was finished, I simply double clicked on the 'create image' button to start a new append.. and it still did it. The first append was smaller, so I assume it worked, but the second one immediately afterwards was 4 gig which was about the size of the original.

 

I just checked the results of my incremental. Yesterday, I set up a task to do daily incrementals. The first time it created a huge image file of almost 75G (this is an image of my documents drive; haven't made an incremental of the OS drive yet). This was expected since it was the first image made. Today's task fired up right on time and made a second image (I had added some photos). Today's incremental was 216Meg. Just about right on the nose to what I added. So it seemed to work perfectly in my case. Since both incrementals (the initial full and the second) were created by a task, it's assured that the file names will be the same (other than the second one having "2" appended).

 

My first append worked fine too, but I hadn't added anything and immediately tried another just to see the results and it created another huge image file.

It's as though, if it finds nothing to append, rather than say so and not do anything, it decides to do a full backup instead.