Difficulty Limiting Backup Size
I tried to set up Acronis to only back up one hard drive on my computer (the one the OS is installed on). That drive is only 500 GB in size, and I have excluded several large directories I don't care to have backed up (the video games, primarily). However, after letting Acronis run all night to create the initial backup, it runs to approximately 986 GB, then seems to stop. Some extra details:
The backup disk is a NAS, a Seagate DP6. I can write to the NAS, and it seems to otherwise be set up correctly. When I leave Acronis running, though, and look at the NAS in Windows, it shows that it is completely empty. When I look at the NAS monitor (via the Seagate webapp), it also reports the volume as being empty. The NAS does report that data is incoming at ~12 MB/s though, so I guess something is happening. Maybe it's just because the operation doesn't complete that it doesn't count the space as used.
I have tried two syntax to exclude a drive. I first tried:
"D:\"
That did not work. I am now trying:
"D:\*"
That backup attempt has only been running for an hour or so, so it is unclear yet if it will also fail. I'm new to Acronis, so I would appreciate any help I could get.
I don't have a local drive large enough to test a full backup. Perhaps I could just try to backup a folder? But the current attempt is still running. I think it's headed into the ditch too, the bar is only 1/8 full and is already 150 GB.
Edit: It's a versioning backup, so it's supposed to make a full image now, and then a few differential versions before making another full image.
If you want to exclude the D:\ partition, you can do this, if you do a disk backup, without using exclusions. Backing up and restoring a sub set of the partitions of the system disk is somewhat risky, however, for the average user, but it is manageable.
To set up the backup without D:\ at all, click on "entire PC" as the source, you will then see 2 options. CHoose disk and partitions, and select the deisred partitioins. This will make your backup much smaller, you can then try on a local disk and see if it completes normally.
I am trying your advice, it just takes awhile. Sorry, I got home late today. I will update when I know if it worked or not. Thank you for your help!
Note that NOT including all partitions in the backup can lead to issues when you restore the entire disk to a blank disk. Make sure you have a way to backup your not included content.
To minimize issues, include all the hidden partitions.
The other drives are not Windows drives, so I shouldn't need them for anything. Setting it to just backup the one drive worked, although the backup size is smaller than I expected. Is there some compression that goes on? In any case, your advice worked, thank you so much!
Yes, there is compression. Depending on the type of files, it can be significant. A fresh Windows installation can be backed up in 20GB. If you have a lot of files that are already a compressed format (pictures, programs, videos) then the compression factor will be much less 10 to 20%