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Why 500 MB incremental backup file despite hardly any change in disk content?

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After having used Acronis True Image once a while when I remembered to backup manually 1) my system partition and 2) important parts of my data partition I have installed a NAS in my home network and created a task which makes daily incremental updates to the NAS. Everyday I looked now what has happened during the night and I am very surprised to find out that e.g. yesterday´s incremental backup file of my system partition C: is 500 MB big although I had not been at home yesterday at all and the computer was only mainly idling or doing some work on the data partition without installing any new program or similar on the system partition. I actually expected a very small incremental backup file of my system partition since in my opinion practically nothing can have changed.

Why is this incremental backup file so large ?

Franz47

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Also, at some point ATI is going to consolidate your backup set into a large file and then begin overwriting the old files. That could be what's happening in this case.

Also, bascially, if the file's changed, it's changed, and system partitions are changing themselve all the time. ;) ATI could be designed to examine the full content of the file and of the previous backups in the set and see what the changes are, but that would take as long a backup or longer and then the backing up would still have to occur. A program designed that way would certianly place a premium on diskspace over speed.

With hdisks as cheap as they are, I prefer the premium placed on speed, but it doesn't suit all people.

If you are running any kind of a regular or scheduled defrag progam, TrueImage will pick up all the changes in its subsequent incremental.

Scott Hieber wrote:
Also, at some point ATI is going to consolidate your backup set into a large file and then begin overwriting the old files. That could be what's happening in this case.

When starting that daily backup task I actually started out with a new complete backup.

Scott Hieber wrote:
With hdisks as cheap as they are, I prefer the premium placed on speed, but it doesn't suit all people.

True. I do also prefer speed, so the NAS needs to be turned on only a short time.