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Hard Drive size versus Acronis Back-up

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I have 2 differents questions regarding Hard Drive size versus Acronis Back-up

Situation 1

On the hard drive of my computer I use to split system/softwares on 1 disk and datas on a different one. Currently my computer hard drive has a size of 1 To and is splited  in 2 disks, 1 drive C: for the system with 150 Go (which is enough for Windows 10) and 1 drive D: for datas with 850 Go. Obviously I do 2 different Back-up 1 for system and 1 datas.

My question regards the situation of computer hard drive crash. I will buy a new 1To hard drive and what hapen then regarding system retauration :

- do I have to split it in 2 parts (150 and 850 Go ... exactly !) and  only after I can restaure the disk C:,

- I restaure the disk C: on the 1To hard drive and then I resize / create the previous partitions D: using a partition manager software,

- I restaure the disk C: on the 1To new hard drive and, miracle, a C: partition of 150 Go is automatly created by Acronis ?

Situation 2

My question is about Acronis True Image 2016 and incremential back-up. I create the initial back-up on an externat HD. Then I do 2 incrementals back-up. Then I wish to create a new complete version. What I understand is that the initial version will be saved and will stay by the new complete version. This means that, if my first back-up has for exemple a size of 1 To, after 2 incerments a 2 To External HD will not do the job, for à 1 To intial back up, I will have to use at least a 3 To Hard Drive. Am I right or not ?

Hope my questions are clear despite my English :-)

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Hello JJF, 

Please see forum post: 117004: Great Acronis "How-To" videos and other Acronis Resources which has a good range of resources and videos showing how to use Acronis to backup and restore your system.

When you create a backup image of your main computer hard drive, you can do this as the Entire Disk, i.e. of the full 1TB drive including all of its partitions (OS and Data plus any hidden System Reserved, Recovery, Diagnostics, EFI etc).  This would provide the easiest method of recovery in the event of the 1TB drive failing and needing to be replaced.  You can Restore the backup image as a Whole Disk and all your partitions will be recovered without the need to resize these manually.

You can create individual backups of your partitions and do this according to how often your data changes.  These can be restored back individually as needed, but you then need to be more careful about the order of partitions on your drive, especially any hidden system partitions that are needed to allow Windows to boot correctly.

When restoring partitions, you can take several options, one is to restore the size 'as is' = the exact same size as was saved, or you can allow Acronis to restore and resize partitions automatically = resize to fit the available space on the drive.  The automatic resizing is only really useful if you are restoring to a different size drive than the one you backed up from.

With regard to backup image sizes, that really depends on how much data you have on your hard drive.  Acronis will employ compression to shrink the size of data in the backup archive, but there are some file types which do not compress very much, such as JPEG images for example.

You would need to make an initial Full backup image of your drive or partitions and see how big that is before considering how many full, incremental or differential backup images you can store on your external HD drive.

Thank's Steve for your answers,

For the restauration of my system your answer is very clear. From what I understand, the good news is that for the question of restauration partition size I just have to choose the right option adapted to my situation (thank's also to Acronis True Image).

Regarding what I called situation 2 (incremental back-up from one HD to another HD) : the bad news is that my original file to save is mainly made of images, videos and pdf, each of them with a low rate of compression. As the reality of my initial file is 1,5 To (and will grow obviously), that means that I need a 4 To HD for the back up using the incremental method ! The only other solution with a smaller disk would be to erase the previous back-up and start a new back-up, which is not very efficient !!

Thank's again

JJF, for your data files (images, videos and PDF files) - it might be simpler not to use Acronis for backing these up, but to simply synchronise them to your backup drive using a utility such as SyncFolders where you essentially have a duplicate copy of each of the data files rather than dealing with multiple backup image files and multiple copies of the data.

Acronis do have a Sync function but this is a premium feature that needs a Cloud subscription to use unlike in earlier versions where you could to a local sync.

Very good, thank's Steve, your advice seems very clever. I had a look on SyncFolders functionalities, it should be what I was realy looking for  :

- True Image for system back-up (disk C:)

- SyncFolders for datas back-up

... and I can sleep soundly ;-)

Thank's again.