Estimated size of full backup?
Everything else being equal (and I know it's not :) on a Windows 10 Lenovo T540p x64 laptop, if the HD has 464GB, and there is 46.8GB free, according to "This PC", leaving about 417.2GB of "stuff", using essentially default settings in Acronis 2017, about how big should a full backup typically be? More importantly, is there additional disk space used on either the backup OR main drive during the backup process that could potentially push it over the available space on the backup drive? I also have a fair bit of stuff on it that I don't want on the main drive for various reasons, and of course it reduces the available space too. My 2TB backup drive shows it has 599GM free, which seems like it should be OK, but I'm trying to decide if I should get another one with more storage. I know I'll have to sooner rather than later, just trying to see if I can push it a bit more before I have to spring for a bigger backup drive.
I know there's tweaks etc I can do, this is just a research question for now.
TIA
elaine

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Elaine, if you only have around 10% of available free space on your HDD then you need to either make more space on that drive or get a bigger drive.
By default, ATI uses the Microsoft VSS snapshot service which in turn needs free space to work with - I recommend downloading the free Acronis VSS Doctor (link in my signature) and use this to check whether VSS can run correctly.
If you are seeing quotas are violated and write errors, then assuming that this is for your backup drive, then this is because you have too little space on that drive to write a new backup file. If you only have around 600GB of free space on the backup drive and are backing up over 400GB of source data, then this is not enough to allow for a minimum of 2 full backups to be created.
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It's been a little while now since I last wrote, and in the the meantime, between Christmas and New Years festivities, I've been diligently scouring my C drive for files I could kill to free up enough space on my 2T backup drive to hold my backups. Turns out for sure that what Acronis called a "write error" (and we won't discuss that massively unintelligible "quotas are violated" error), which meant something different to me than to it, WAS just a space issue. I was able to remove a significant number of duplicate files, etc etc on my C drive, and I now have 2 FULL backups sitting on the backup drive :)
Thanks to all who wrote!
elaine
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Elaine, thanks for the update / feedback - glad to hear that you have been successful in your pruning of data and can fit the 2 full backups on your drive now!
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