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Can ATI properly read differences in SD cards?

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Recently added a micro SD card to my Microsoft Surface Pro 4, to serve as a separate drive for work data files. Naturally I configured a (daily) schedule to backup the card partition incrementally.

However I noticed that each day the incremental difference is roughly the same as the original full backup size, even though I barely changed any files.

My question is can ATI 2015 properly read SD cards to tell the difference from day to day? I would have expected similar behaviour with magnetic disks and SSDs, but something seems off here.

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Aaron, some more information is needed here to understand what is happening?

What is the size of the SD card?
What type of backup are you doing here?  (Disk & Partitions or Files & Folders)
What are you storing on the SD card?
Do you have System Protection active for the SD card?
How is the SD card formatted?

Have you checked the backup task log file for any clues being offered there, i.e. whether the backup might be defaulting to doing a Sector-by-Sector type backup?

The micro SD card is a SanDisk 128GB.

Backing up the card's partitions with an incremental scheme.

Only storing work data files - programming source code, project files, images, etc.

Not sure what you refer to as System Protection, but it's definitely not write protected otherwise wouldn't be able to move files to it. The backup process per se succeeds, but the incremental backups are oddly as huge as the original.

The micro SD card came pre-formatted as exFAT.

Honestly I cannot find anything within the ATI user interface that reveals backup log activity. All it ever shows are last backup (which succeeded) and next backup time. Don't see anything extra in Windows Event Viewer either.

Sector-by-sector backup mode is not selected.

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Aaron, the issue here is because the SD card is formatted as exFAT which in turn forces ATI to use Sector-by-Sector mode for the backup, hence the much larger file sizes seen.

See the ATI 2015 User Guide:

Supported file systems

  • FAT16/32
  • NTFS
  • Ext2/Ext3/Ext4 *
  • ReiserFS *
  • Linux SWAP *

If a file system is not supported or is corrupted, Acronis True Image 2015 can copy data using a sector-by-sector approach.

You would need to format the SD card as NTFS to avoid sector-by-sector backups.

I reformatted the card as NTFS, and the incremental backup behaviour looks good now. Thank you.

Glad to hear that all is working as you want, thanks for the feedback.