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incremental backup size

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I upgraded from 2015 to 2020 and was surprised to see the way .tibx files operated. I'm a bit shocked and mystified that the first incremental backup almost doubled the size of the full backup.

My full was 206,413 mb and after the first incremental the size is 400,711 mb. I did not add add any programs, all this was just three days of emails and no activity to speak of. This is a personal computer, not a business.

I didn't write down the size of the drive before the first backup, but right now it is 629,290 mb.

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Robert, sorry but very difficult to guess as to why your incremental size should be so large if nothing really has changed on your computer?

Is it possible that Windows 10 Maintenance tasks have been active and have triggered any defragmentation of the drive, or installed any culmulative updates etc?

If you have the latest Update #3 25700 installed for ATI 2020, you could see if you can mount the incremental image and do a separate mount of the full backup image, to allow a comparison to see where the extra size comes from?  The mount option hasn't officially been announced as being fixed in the latest update but various users have mentioned it working for them.

Thanks, Steve,

Must have been something going on, but I don't know what. That is my C:\drive. I also have a separate backup for D:\ and it looks more realistic. Drive is 263 gb, full backup is 244.2 gb (not much compression there), and incremental is 106gb.

I do have v. 25700, but I'm not familiar with mounting the backup files. would you enlighten me?

Robert, what do you have for exclusions on the C: drive backup? There is a lot Windows can do on the drive... e.g. temp files, swap file, paging file, hibernation file, indexing, Recycle Bin, etc., and then there are Windows updates, and caching by other programs. A lot of this stuff is excluded by default, but not all.

In Explorer, right click on a backup file and see if the Mount option is there. It then makes the backup file look like another drive.

Steve, I have the default exclusions. See screenshot attached. I have also attached a screenshot of my 2015 backup files. The last incremental was pretty large, but the former ones seemed in line.

 

I do have the "mount" option and I see how to do it, but I'm not sure what to look for after I mount it. Looks like one drive and I'm not sure how to differentiate between the stuff backed up in Full and the stuff in Incremental.

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Robert, the first comment is that you are still using a backup from an earlier version of ATI that uses .tib files, so in reality very little in ATI 2020 is different for this backup from previous versions.  New Disk backups in ATI 2020 now use .tibx files hence my earlier comments about having the mount option.

When you do mount a backup file, it will be given a drive letter, which then would allow you to use a utility such as TreeSize Free to investigate where the largest volume of files are stored for that drive letter.

Steve,

Sorry to be so dense, but all these files show 4/29/20, which is the Full Backup. I don't see anything for the 5/3 incremental backup. I might should have stayed with 2015.

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Robert, your new image shows a .tibx format backup file where all incremental files are added to and consolidated within a single file, so to see these files, you need to double-click on the .tibx file in Explorer, which will then show you the separate files within the container.

For me, I do not see any option to Mount any of the incremental files within the host .tibx file when I try to do this!

That's what I thought. I tried to mount the backups individually, but didn't see a way. I'll wait for the second incremental and see how big it is.

My other concern is whether or not I'll ever get these .tibx files transferred to the cloud. I use Backblaze cloud backup and if it starts over every time that Acronis writes another incremental to the envelope, I'll never catch up.

Robert, if Backblaze uses a method to identify only changed data within files, rather than uploading complete files after changes are detected, then this should cope with the changes made to .tibx files by incremental backups.

I have been using Rsync to backup one of my incremental .tibx backup files to my NAS for several weeks and this does a similar copy of only changed data within the tibx file.

Thanks, Steve. I'll watch it. My internet speed isn't blazing, so backing up takes a while for any files.