Incrementals keep growing - but no data changing?
Hi all.
I've installed the trial of Acronis Backup & Recovery 11.5 to test it out and I've found something very strange. I've configured an incremental to run every hour and capture C:\Temp, backing it up to a network share.
Despite the fact that C:\Temp contains only one file (a test.txt file) which never changes, the backup archive file seems to be growing. Usually only by a couple of kB per run, but I wouldn't have thought that it should grow at all. In fact, I wouldn't have expected it to even be creating a backup file if nothing is changing.
More interesting is the fact that the Acronis GUI seems to think that each backup archive is zero size, which doesn't line up with what Windows Explorer thinks of the files themselves.
I've attached screenshots of both the Acronis view and the Explorer view. Can anybody please shed some light on whats going on here? I certainly don't want to use this product if incremental backups are going to slowly chew through my disk space unnecessarily.
Many thanks.
'Backed up data size' that you see in GUI is indeed zero for these incremental. Archive file on disk for incremental backups contains some internal information about previous backups that grows for the long chain of incrementals. It's not recommended to use long incremental chains (and 70 backups is long). Actual occupied size on disk can be seen in 'occupied space' column that is hidden by default.
For archive of 12000 files size of such 'empty' incremental backup seems to be about 600 KB and grow about the same rate of 1.5 KB per archive.