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How does Aconis determine what to backup in an Incremental

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I am running Vista 64 bit and for 5 weeks now, it has been running very smoothly each night.  I am NOT using sector by sector backups.

On Monday AM, I run a FULL backup, but copy all of previous week backups to a different HDD.  On every other morning I run an INCREMENTAL.

Question: how does Acronis True Home 2009 determine what is to be backed up from one day to the next.  Some days the INCREMENTAL size is 8GB, other days it is 2GB.

Thanks

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Hello Jim,

Thank you for using [[http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/ | Acronis True Image]]

The backup process is based on the sector-level Acronis Snapshot technology.

The Snapshot Manager driver creates a view of the system volume and a bitmap describing the used sectors on this volume that are included into the full backup. When Acronis program starts to create an incremental or differential backup, it reads the sectors on the system volume. Once a sector has changed its state according to the created bitmap, this means that it should be included into the respective incremental or differential backup file.

There can be several reasons of the issue when the size of the created incremental or differential backup is almost the size of the full one.

- Defragmentation - An incremental or differential backup created after the disk is defragmented will be considerably larger than usual. This is because the defragmentation program changes file locations on the disk, and backups reflect these changes.

- Creating an incremental or differential backup after recovering the full one – An incremental or differential backup created after the full one was restored will be considerably larger than usual. This is because restoring a backup archive changes file locations on the disk, and backups reflect these changes.

- Using fast incremental backup method to back up partitions that have Microsoft Outlook .pst file – This issue is only with fast incremental backup. It does not occur when creating a regular incremental backup.

- Acronis True Image Home 2009 issue – The algorithm of incremental backup archive creation is different from the regular one of Acronis True Image Echo and is similar to its fast incremental backup method. Hence, incremental backup archives in Acronis True Image Home 2009 can be considerably large.

Thank you.

So disk/volemes backup is bytes based?

Does Files backup also copy only byte differences or whoe files?

Does enabling fast incremental backup forces to copy whole files? (I would prefer to have full filles and not be dependent on previous backups).

I have ATI11H (very pleased with it) running it on XP Home Edition v.5.1

I did an initial Full Backup by sectors when I created a full drive- image. When following up with incremental or differential backups, do I need to specify either of those also "by sectors?" Could not find the answer in the manual.

Thanks for the help.

My "guess" would be they would be the same as when the task was created and the same as when the full backup was created. Since the incremental or differential selection is a part of the same task which created the full, it is all one package.