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Back-up file twice the size of original

Thread needs solution

Hello, All

Looked around before posting, couldn't find exact issue

ATI 2016 Build 6581 

I have a 1 TB disk drive in my laptop, win 8.1 i7 Dell, files on disk around 450 Gb, formatted a second 1 Tb drive in a caddy, backed up original, size on backup drive over 900 gb.  No room left for incrementals. Settings  check "sector by sector" unchecked "Back up unallocated space", these are the same settings I used on previous laptop, Asus, however backed up to internal second drive instead of caddy.  Where am I going wrong? Possible I formatted the caddy drive incorrectly?

Thanks--

Al

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Al, welcome to these user forums.

Can you confirm that you do NOT have 'sector by sector' enabled for your backup as this will result in a backup file of a similar size to the whole source drive (less upto 20% for compression).

Sector by sector should not be used unless you have a specific reason for needing to backup every sector on the drive, i.e. for forensic purposes or to try to recover deleted data etc.  ATIH may default to using sector by sector if any bad sectors are encountered on the source drive, so run CHKDSK /R against the drive if you suspect this may be the case.  /R will check all sectors so will take an extended time to complete.

Yes, sector by sector is checked. I'll change that. On the last laptop, the 1 TB drives were partitioned into 2/ 500 GB , so the unallocated was very little, 400+ GB on a 500 GB partition, compaired to currently 400+ on a 1 TB partition. That must be the difference. Thanks a lot for getting back to me so quickly. 

AL

Al, you should see a significant difference in the backup sizes without having sector by sector enabled.