Skip to main content

Large Hard Drives, Small Backup?

Thread needs solution

I am backing up 2 hard dives to and external USB drive. The drives contain a total of  2.5 TB of data of all sorts, including ictures and video. The backup, is only 640GB. Compression is normal. Even allowing for excluded system files, this seems small. Any expanation.

0 Users found this helpful

COrrectioon, Aconis 2018, not 2016

Hard to say without more info such as possible exclusions that we're set. I'd recommend mounting the backup (right click the .tib in Windows file explorer and mount as volume - give it a drive letter). Then, explore the contents. You may also want to use a free tool like treesize to compare folder sizes to it and the original to see if you can identify any major differences.

But yeah, something sounds like it is nit there. 2.5TB won't compress that small - especially if there are no compressible file formats such as video and pictures. This is likely a configuration error (just guessing). Some screenshots of the backup settings and the disk volumes in file explorer could be helpful.

 

I checked, and it seems my Onedrive folder locates in Users is not being backed up. In the past , it was working fine, same computer, but I replaced the old external drive with a new, bigger one one problem arose.

Acronis are excluding the OneDrive folder by default due to recent changes to how OneDrive works with their Files On Demand feature.

See KB 61425: Acronis True Image 2018: OneDrive folders are excluded by default

So now if I want to recover an earlier version of a file I stored on Onedrive I"m screwed.

I'd do a test. Create a new file/folder backup and only select the main OneDrive folder in your profile (or a subset of it as a test to keep it smaller). Then run that backup and check the results.

If you modified the disk, you may need to go back into the configs of that on and re-pick the one drive folder (even if it looks to be correct). For instance, deselect the existing one drive folder and save. Then reselect it, save and run the backup again.

My recollection is that this problem was fixed in ATI 2019 for non-cloud backups; still a problem for Cloud backups, but there is an alternative cloud based backup for Office 365 data including the OneDrive folder.

Ian

Check and delete the windows search index if that exists. Took 79 Gb on my disc but was never in any backup. So that explains the difference between the HD filled size and the size of the backup.