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Disk Space Control - Please explain

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I am not an expert user - I just want this to work and leave me alone.

I have several drives, but my C drive is what I'd like to back up because it has the operating system and all of my programs. The C drive is a mere 95.7 GB. (I have a lot of other stuff on other drives but let's work on this one for now.) I have a dedicated drive, G (named BackUp) which has a capacity of 1,000 GB (1 TB) that I use for backup. I have "version chain" backup setting.

The problem is the G drive gets so full from the backups that I get error messages from Windows (or something) saying my disk is full (1 TB!).

My question is why does this happen? Can't I limit the space taken by the backups in some way so it stays within - for example 300 GB (three times the size of my C drive)?

Newbie essentially -

Thanks for any kind help.

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Porsche guy,

What version of ATi do you have?

Make sure that:
- only the disk C is included in the backup,
- all hidden partitions are included in the backup (see hidden partitions by right clickin on the computer icon on your desktop, choose manage, storage, disk management). If you have Win7 or vista, you might have a system reserved partition that is hidden. With a laptop, you might have a recovery partition, or OEM, or diagnostics, or system partition that is hidden.

Once this done, check your backup scheme. The best one, IMO, is the following one:
- custom backup scheme (for 2011 and later versions)
- incremental backup,
- do a new full backup after 6 incrementals (for a daily backup) or 3 incremental (for a weekly backup)
- keep only the X most recent versions. If you want to maximize X, and if T is the size of your backup disk, and A the average size of a full backup plus its following incrementals so that A * (X + 1.5)= T the 1.5 buffer thing is a guestimate.

There are other retention settings within versions like 2011 that don't work as well as the keep only X most recent version settings.
If you change your retention settings to experiment, create a new backup task instead of editing the existing one.