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Need to backup to offsite location, .tib too darn big!

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Howdy,

I'm in need of saving full system images to an offsite location daily. My problem is, the .tib files that Acronis makes are too darn big! How am I supposed to transfer 150GB over the internet if my ISP's data cap is 150GB monthy? Using Acronis' built-in bootable media creator, you can take that .tib and convert it to a much more manageable 850MB .iso file ready to be burned to a USB or disc. Only problem is, I need to automate this process, and there doesn't seem to be a clean way to do so. Has anyone come up with a nifty way to perform this task? 

Thanks!

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Andy,

A few questions.  Are you or do you need to backup your entire hard drive each and every day requiring this 150GB of space?

If no then do you really have 150GB of new data each and every day to backup?

The reason I ask is that your initial backup to the cloud will require whatever space is necessary to complete the task as requested by the user.  It your hard drive has 150GB of data on it then you can reasonably expect to save about 20% of that in compression of the data as the backup is created saving you about 30GB for a total 120GB backup.

Subsequent cloud backups of the same disk will only require backup of any data that has changed since the last backup so you can expect a much smaller backup size unless you really do have 150GB of new data each day to backup.

Where you might find the above to vary is when Windows decides to do one of its major upgrades.  In this case Windows saves a backup of itself to disk before installing the upgrade which could significantly increase the size required for a post upgrade backup.

Andy wrote: "Using Acronis' built-in bootable media creator, you can take that [150GB] .tib and convert it to a much more manageable 850MB .iso file ready to be burned to a USB or disc. "

I am not sure where you found that information but sorry I do not believe it is correct - there is no way it is possible to convert 150GB of .tib file data into less than 1GB whether as a .ISO file or any other type of file!

The only possibility I can think of is to use a file splitting utility. They were popular back in the days when we use floppy disks. I think programs in with "ZIP" in there name allow the creation of *.zip and other archive formats split across multiple smaller files - useful when emailing things in pre-Dropbox era. Just checked and Directory Opus (my favoured file manager) allows this to be done without resorting to zipping.

Ian

" Using Acronis' built-in bootable media creator, you can take that .tib and convert it to a much more manageable 850MB .iso file ready to be burned to a USB or disc. "

Are you sure you are not looking at the size of the recovery system itself?  That's about twice the size of my various recovery media but at least within the ballpark.

Maybe he means that he's setting the size of the .tib to 850Mb?  It would still result in multiple TIB files, just broken into 850Mb chunks that add up to whatever size the actual backup needs to be.  If that's the case, you'd still be transferring the same amount of data.

image

I agree, there is no way to actually compress a backup into something smaller than it already is.  Just make sure to NOT select sector-by-sector and you could try to set the Performance >>> compression level = MAX to try and squeak out some additional compression at the cost of backup speed.