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Full backup takes hours, subsequent incremental backup takes days

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I'm backing up all the user folders on my Windows 10 machine, total backup size is around 800GB and the initial first full backup takes about 8 hours including validation. When I subsequently re-run the backup job, the incremental backup runs and True Image reports that the backup will be complete in 1 day and 18 hours, but after 2 days the job still hasn't completed and TI reports about another 8 hours left.

I've given up with this particular backup job and now just delete the existing version and then do a full backup.

The backup of my system disk seems to work just fine, with the incremental backup taking a few hours including validation but for the backup of the users folders, it just doesn't seem to work as expected.

Does anyone else find this? Do you always have to ignore incremental backup and just do a full backup each time?

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John, 800GB in user folders for a Files & Folders backup sounds very large and may contain some very deep nesting of files which will impact on overall performance.

For a full backup, Acronis only needs to navigate through the source folder paths to capture all the files / folders.

For any subsequent incremental (or differential) backup, then there is much more processing that is needed to be able to identify what has changed since the previous backup (incremental) or initial full backup (differential) was created, so this is probably where the performance hit is coming from.

The options here are to either try to reduce the source data size, i.e. by splitting this backup task into several tasks of specific types of data (documents, music, video in separate tasks perhaps?) or else switch to doing a Disks & Partitions backup for this user data where Acronis looks at data at a sector / block level to determine changes, so should be faster.

Note: if switching from Files & Folders to Disks & Partitions, you will also be switching from using the older .tib files to using the new .tibx files for the backup images.

John,

800GB is a large amount of data to backup so total time involved will be heavily computer resource dependent.

Backup of folders is performed differently then backup of disks/partitions.  Folder/file backups are done at the bit level whereas folder/file backups are done at the block level which is faster.

You might consider doing the backup of user folder items in segments rather than all together.  Example:  One backup for Documents, Download, and Favorites folders, another backup for Music and Video folders, and yet another for Photos.  The point here is to attempt to reduce backup size to 250GB or so each.  Doing so will improve performance.

Thanks @Steve, I've marked your response as the answer as you replied first, but my thanks also to @Enchantech as I've decided to just backup the entire disk partition as the bulk of it's content is the user folders.