what am I doing wrong/right

I created an Exact image backup of my primary drive to a second hard drive. That went fine. Then I created a daily incremental backup to the same file, but it creats a new file in the second drive with the same name. Now I have 4 backup's in 4 days. The 2nd, third, and fourth files are certainly not only changes to the original backup, because they are 600-800 mb's each. With this system, I will run out of room on my 160gig hard drive. What is it I need to do to put all incremental backups within the first backup created, thus creating an up to date backup of my primary drive on a daily basis. Keng

I know this must seem very elementary to most of you.

 

First, incremental backups are always additional files. The full backup to restore is the original full backup plus every incremental backup up to the last date you want to restore. If the full backup was Monday and the incrementals were Tuesday through Friday, you'd have to have all 5 files to restore to the status of Friday. However, if you only wanted to restore to the status of Tuesday, you'd only want the full backup and the Monday and Tuesday incrementals.

Personally, I make a full system backup each time. That way there is only one file with all the information. You might want to do somethng like make a full system backup every Friday that you keep for a few months and make a full system backup Monday through Thursday that keep overwriting.

The incrementals are large because with imaging, all changed sectors are included in the incremental. On the boot partition, many sectors change as Windows works, so the incrementals for the boot partition will always be large. If you defragment the partition, the incrementals will be even larger.