ATIH 2011 will not performance differential backup
I have been a long time user of Ghost. I recently bought a new PC and laptop. They both came with Win 7 and my copy of Ghost will not run on Win 7. Looked at both Ghost 15 and ATIH 2011. Finally decided on ATIH because of its ability to run the recovery environment from USB flash drive and a single tib file for multiple drives backup. However there is one problem I encountered that I have not been able to resolve even though there are a substantial number of threads on the forum - make a full backup, set numbers of differential backups then another a full backup.
This is what I did:
1. Create a "Disk and Partition backup" task. I did select a destination that is different from the default location.
2. Under "backup scheme", I chose "custom scheme". Set "backup method" to Differential.
3. Select "create a full version after 5 differential versions".
4. Turned on automatic cleanup. Select "store no more than 20 recent version chains".
The task runs weekly as scheduled (although not through the ATIH scheduler as it cannot wake the PC from S3 sleep). But the problem is all the backups look like full backups to me. I now have 14 weekly backups that are of similar size (within 100MB of each other).
Yes, I have look through the posts on the forum and am aware of what defrag and restore can cause large differential backup file. So I did another test to eliminate these other variables.
1. I made sure Windows defrag is disabled.
2. I ran a manual full backup of my C drive.
3. I ran defrag on my C drive (a 3rd party defrag program).
4. I ran another full backup of my C drive. The size of the backup file is closer to the one made under step 2 (file size = 7.793GB).
5. Without doing anything else, I ran a manual differential backup of my C drive.
As I ran defrag and then a full backup, I expected ATIH to have reset the files that it thinks had changed. So the differential backup that I ran straight after the full backup should result in a file that is very small in size. However, the differential backup file is actually slightly bigger than the full backup file - about 100KB larger (probably the backup log created for the full backup). So it is appears to me that either (a) ATIH does not tell itself properly that files had been backed up by a full backup and include these file in the differential backup again or (b) ATIH incorrectly thinks it is doing a full backup. Just to double check, I ran a differential backup of my drive C with a traditional backup program. This resulted in a backup file of 478MB in contract to the ATIH differential backup file size of 8.084GB. A huge difference.
I am running Win 7 x64 and ATIOH 2011 update 1 build 6597. Can anyone help me please? Don't really want to go back to Ghost.
Thanks
Hi Pat,
Thanks for you suggestions. I have found what was causing my problem. I did everything right except I told ATIH to append the current date (using @date@) to the file name. Since the file name is changing every time, ATIH did the right thing and do a full backup because it could not find a previous version. I removed "@date@" and it is now working fine.
Weird... There should be no issue adding @date@ and @time@ to the file name. THis is what I do for all my backups (full, differential, incremental). ATI is sorting this out just fine.
Anyway, if you are OK with your naming now, and your backup is working, that's good.