Acronis backup files taking up all of HDD space...

Hi

I've been using Acronis True Image to make incremental backups of my 320GB HDD but they've ended up using all the space on my 500GB WD mybook USB HDD, and there are only 3 incremental backups and the original full backup.

I've got about 90GB free on the 320GB HDD so it shouldn't be using 500GB to back it up should it?

Is there anyway I can remove some of the 3 incremental backups and still be able to use the backup if I need to?

And in the future how do I not use so much HDD space when using Acronis?

Thanks in advance for any advice on this.

 

hmm DO you take backup using bit by bit method then it would occupy more space

 

Er not following you?

Are you saying that incremental backups actually take up more space than a differential backup?

 

Right now, since you're using a full backup with incremental backups, the only thing you can do is to create a new full backup and start fresh from there.

The problem is that each incremental backup in a chain of incrementals is necessary in order to do a restoration to the last good set of files because each incremental backup only contains the changes that were made since the time of the immediately preceding backup, whether full or incremental. As a result, each time you do an incremental backup, you end up with another backup file that you have to keep in order to fully restore everything to the point at which you did that last incremental.

One possibility, if you want to keep your existing backups around, just in case, is to compress the files and then burn them to DVDs so that you can free up your external drive. Then, you could start off with a new base full backup of the computer as it stands today and use that going forward, with the comfort of knowing that you could still go even farther back if you had to.

Going forward, you should probably be using Acronis' "differential" backup method rather than the incremental method, since you seem to have a lot of changes to your system in between backups.

According to section 3.2 of the Acronis True Home 2009 User Guide, a differential backup captures all changes that have been made since the last full backup, which disregards any incremental backups. Using that method, you could create a base full backup, and then each time you want to update the backup, create a new differential backup that relates to that full backup, and once the differential backup has been verified as valid, either delete any earlier differential backups, or else compress them and transfer them to DVD for archiving.

 

Well it's not that I make a lot of changes, if anything I go through and remove stuff to save space so I would have thought that'd make the incremental backup files smaller, but I don't backup all that often, I've had Acronis since September and I've only backed up 4 times...

Anyway I'll do as you have suggested and start again with a full backup of how my system is at present, seeing as it's working fine and then do differential backups and compress those with 7zip and burn them to DVDs.

I really wish backing up was less space and time consuming though.

 

I've used Seagate DiscWizard which is a strip down version of ATI to first clone a 60GB HDD to a 120GB HDD and then used the 60GB to back up the entire C: drive which contains my OS and programs. I've been able to back up 4-5 times with plenty of room left over.

I could never understand the difference between differential and incremental. I'm almost glad I don't have the option.

For D ata I use Karen's Replicator to a different external more often.

 

Since an incremental backup is basically a record of all of the changes that have occurred since the last backup, even if you go through and merely remove a lot of things, you're still creating a lot of changes to the system, all of which must be taken into account by the incremental backup in order to be able to use the incremental to generate a complete image of the current configuration from the original full backup to which the incremental backup relates.

In other words, if file A was included in the original full backup, was then deleted, and later you made an incremental backup, the incremental backup would still have to record the fact that the space occupied by file A in the full backup was no longer so occupied.

You might also consider only backing certain files up, instead of doing a blanket backup of the entire drive - I don't know for certain how Acronis handles unallocated or empty space when it does a backup, but I'm pretty sure that such space has to be accounted for and kept track of somehow, so if you're just backing up the entire physical disk, you might be making more work for the app than you really need to.