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Who here knows how pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys are handled?

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Having been surprised at the smallness of a "Full Backup" .tib file I created today of a C: drive, I mounted that .tib and was surprised to see both of the subject files in it in all their 8GB and 6GB glory. I'd certainly EXPECTED that Acronis did not include these in the .tib, and in fact the .tib is so small it seems they CAN'T POSSIBLY be included in them, so...

What is the "magic" I am missing? That these two .sys files are somehow just identically-sized (identical to the originals, that is) dummy or placeholder files? Does anyone know?

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From what I understand, the program stores "place markers" for those two files but the actual files are not stored, and only the place markers are restored.

Yeah I believed that as well, but I don't know how an empty file can show-up in Windows Explorer as (in the case of my hiberfil.sys) 6,441,791,488 bytes of "Size on disk" (I just mounted this .tib again and looked at Explorer's "Properties").

There's maybe an easy explanation for how you'd "fake" such a thing but I don't know what that might be!

tomf wrote:
(I just mounted this .tib again and looked at Explorer's "Properties")

So... What happened?.. The files have to be manually excluded, or - what, exactly? o.0

Edit: Oic., NVM., old(er) version!..:)