FULL BACKUP

Peter, welcome to these public User Forums.

5.5GB backup size for a full backup task from a source of ~ 300GB does not sound correct but more information is needed to try to understand why / how etc?

First checkpoint: What icon is shown on the Source panel for this backup task?  Is this an icon of a PC monitor, a Disk Drive or a Folder?

If you click on the icon on the Source panel, what does it show as being selected in the listing that shows next?  Are all the partitions on your internal disk drives shown as being selected?

Screen images are always helpful.

Hello Steve , thanks for your response.

The icon shown is that of a monitor, when I initially set this up I believe the option of "backup entire PC was the one that I selected. I have it set to complete a Full backup every 5 days  followed by differentials thereafter. Clicking on the icon does nothing. Clicking on the "Options" tab reveals the backup scheme and I have attached screenshots of both. 

Peter,

You do understand that with your current scheme before clean up of old backups occur you will exceed 4TB of data don't you?  If this is your intent that's fine, I only ask as users get confused about this.

No I didn't and don't understand , you are correct. I certainly am therefore a confused user

Sorry I should  have asked, what have I done wrong?

Peter, thanks for the extra information / screen images.

How many internal disk drives are installed in this PC?  Is there just 1 drive or more?

How large is your destination backup drive for storing your backups?

Please understand how your choice of automatic cleanup works with your setting of 'Delete version chains older than 120 days' that nothing will be deleted until 120 days after the next Full backup is created successfully, so not until 127 days from the first backup and repeating at a similar interval.

The above doesn't answer why your full backup was only 5.5GB in size unless it wasn't actually a full backup but was a differential one!

What does your Recovery panel show for this task?

Hi Steve, thanks for your help, appreciated.

There are 2 internal drives on this PC - the "C" drive and the "E" drive. The E drive is a spare and I'm not interested in backing that up. I believe that I'm only backing up the C drive. 

I believe that the G drive shown on the screenshot was created when I installed Acronis I'm not sure what its' purpose is.

The F drive is an external USB 4TB drive that is  used to store backups, I have also created a USB system restore drive as advised in Acronis documentation . 

I'm inferring from your comment that I might be keeping backups for too long, is that correct? When setting this up initially I had thought that around 4 months was more than enough to keep the data but it also seems from user Enchantech's comment that I have mis understood how the backup works. I think I'll have to revisit this and "read the manual" again. 

Of course that still leave sme with the original question that started this all off......

Thanks for all the help, really appreciated

With regard to the recovery panel I have uploaded 2 screenshots: entire PC and "disks" - clearly the spare disk is being backed up.

I see two oddities in the original posting graphic. The first is that the Full backup shows 5.5GB backed up but 179.3 GB data to recover. I could understand this on a differential, but not full. Second, what is the 114.2 GB freed. With 120 days for automatic cleanup, what is doing the freeing?

Peter, you should consider creating a Disk/Partitions backup for you main C: drive. Under the automatic cleanup, you could set the automatic cleanup to store no more than X backup chains, X being determined by your space requirements. Remember that it will create a new backup before deleting the oldest chain, so you need room for X+1 chains on the destination drive.

Peter,
 

By default the application will backup the Entire PC which includes all internal disks as you now know.

With the task settings set per your screenshot a full Entire PC backup will occur after every 5 differential backups thus in 120 days you will have a total of 24 full backups plus the associated daily 5 incremental backups.  With your Entire PC backup right at 180GB x 24 = 4,320GB.  This does not include the differential files nor the 7 days that Steve pointed out.

You mentioned that you need to read the documentation, nothing truer can be said here.

Guys,

Thanks for the feedback - I'll be focussing on the documentation over the next couple of days and readdressing everything as a result. If I still get the "oddities" discussed originally I'll raise a technical incident for it 

Just for my information and as per previous screenshot reporting a FULL backup at 5.5GB, should I expect the backup size to reflect the size of data on disk? i.e. ~300GB

Peter,

The application uses compression so your backup size will be smaller than the uncompressed total.

Thank you Enchantech, that would explain it.

Peter Rees wrote:

...

Just for my information and as per previous screenshot reporting a FULL backup at 5.5GB, should I expect the backup size to reflect the size of data on disk? i.e. ~300GB

 

As Enchantech says, there is compression. But even with compression you won't get 300 GB down to 5.5 GB. On a full backup, the Activity should show data backed up to be the same as data to recover. On your first post you can see that Data to recover is 179.3 GB. If you are using the usual exclusions, the Windows page file, swap file, Recycle Bin, etc. are all excluded from the backup, as well as various caches, temp files, etc. So the exclusions and compression could easily bring the 300 GB down to 180 GB.