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Does the sector-by-sector option behave differently between Win 7 and Win 8.1?

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Hello everybody!

We got three PCs here that are backed up by TI 2017 (20.0.5554), options are "whole PC" to Samba share, single version scheme, mail notifications, nothing special really. Two of the PCs run Windows 7 Pro 64 Bit, the third runs Win 8.1 Pro 64 Bit.

With the sector-by-sector option enabled the backup files of the Win 7 machines have a size of roughly two thirds of the amount of data allocated on their respective disks. Sounds reasonable. The Win 8.1 machine however produces a backup file of 100 GB from a 128 GB disk on which 35 GB are allocated. When I turn off the sector-by-sector option on the Windows 8.1 machine the backup size is down to 23 GB as expected. That looks as if turning the sector-by-sector opton on under Windows 8.1 automatically enables the "back up unallocated space" option as well even though the GUI does not show any indication of that happening.

What am I missing here?

Hoping for an explanation...

0 Users found this helpful

Enabling sector by sector by default will back up all disk sectors including unallocated space regardless of operating system installed.

why the difference in size I am not sure.  Could be the disk partitioning scheme, is your 8.1 system using a GPT partition scheme while your Win 7 systems use an MBR scheme?  This could be the difference.

Sector by sector backup is not normally needed when creating disk backups, why do you select that option?