Size of backups
I've just installed True Image Home 2012 and done a backup of my C drive (the type is "disk backup"). The C drive reports 42 GB used, and the backup is 220GB. This rather surprised me. Is it normal that the backup is 5 times the size of the thing being backed up? The disk is a 280GB disk, so is that the more interesting number since this is a disk backup?
Any help understanding this would be great.
Edit: Changed that the C drive has 42G used, not 42G free.
- Log in to post comments
Thomas,
Are you looking at the size of each individual TIB file or the size shown in ATI (sum of all archive sizes attached to that backup)?
- Log in to post comments
I'm going on the size reported in the Acronis user interface, but there's only one backup been performed so far. There is one TIB file on the drive and it's 218 GB.
Rereading my original post I made one rather key mistake. When I said that the C drive has 42G free, what I meant was that the C drive had 42 G USED. Hence my surprise at the 220 GB backup of 42G of stuff.
- Log in to post comments
Thomas,
What does the size read in your file manager (Windows Explorer or similar)?
What disk format are your drives?
You are absolutely sure that sector by sector imaging didn't get ticked by mistake?
- Log in to post comments
For the drive, if I look at the properties of the drive (where you get the pie chart showing the space used and free) it reports 42G. The Acronis user interface reports the same thing. I'm pretty sure that they are NTFS (not at the machine right now, but it was a fresh Windows 7 installation including format, so I'd be suprised if it was anything else, well not FAT anyhow). I did check the "sector by sector imaging" option and I'm pretty sure that wasn't checked when I looked.
I take it I shouldn't expect a 5 fold increase in size.
- Log in to post comments
Thomas Quarendon wrote:I take it I shouldn't expect a 5 fold increase in size.
Most definitely not! :)
- Log in to post comments
Checked, and the C drive is formatted NTFS and the "sector by sector" option is off.
- Log in to post comments
Is it possible a defragmenter was running during the imaging, or something else that could be writing large chunks of data to disk?
See if you can replicate it, but first just in case something is weird with the file sizes being noted in the MFT run checkdisk /r before making another image. You'll need to reboot the PC as this is the system partition which is being checked.
After that if you still get a larger file, see if you get the same result from the recovery CD.
Have you tried exploring or mounting the image file to see if anything stands out as odd?
- Log in to post comments