Large incrcemental backups after upgrading to Win10

Incrementals will reflect the changes at the sector level (bits).  If you are running defrag or trim on your drive, that can increase the size of the changed data quite a bit. .

I would recommend you mount two different incrementals with a drive letter (right click on the specific incremental .tib and "mount").  Once both are mounted as a drive letter, then use a comparision tool like treesize free or mindgems foldersize free and see which folders are showing the difference and compare the contents inside those to see what the culprit really is.

Windows 10 is a different beast than Win 7 and uses fastboot by default.  When you shutdown, it actually hibernates, leaving a hibernation file on the drive.  If you are not excluding the pagefile, hibernation file and the new swapfile.sys, those are constantly changing and will be backed up in Windows.  Another big one could be "system volume information" which is Windows "System protecion".  All of these are excluded by default, but you may want to check your exclusions to be sure.  You'll also backup Windows updates (turn on hidden files and folders and protected operating system files and looke for the a ~bt file on the root of C which may be a Windows 10 upgrade in the works).  iPhone backups could be a huge difference, etc, etc, etc. There a a bunch of possibilities.

Thanks. I just saw that the page, hibernation and swap files weren't excluded. I did so and we'll see where this gets me.

But here is a listing of the backups. You see that the full backup grew from 23GB to 32GB, but there are incremental backups with 50GB and 101GB in between. This is just weird. The above mentioned files are around 8GB; this doesn't explain such results.

D:\Backup\Files\Acronis>dir /od
 Volume in drive D is Storage
 Volume Serial Number is 9E30-A353

 Directory of D:\Backup\Files\Acronis

2016-08-07  10:08                 0 test2.txt
2016-09-03  03:10    23'668'069'376 Files-System_full_b3_s1_v1.tib
2016-09-04  03:09    14'299'109'376 Files-System_inc_b3_s2_v1.tib
2016-09-05  03:15    50'322'228'224 Files-System_inc_b3_s3_v1.tib
2016-09-06  03:25   101'819'977'216 Files-System_inc_b3_s4_v1.tib
2016-09-07  03:11    21'685'642'240 Files-System_inc_b3_s5_v1.tib
2016-09-08  03:07     3'388'202'496 Files-System_inc_b3_s6_v1.tib
2016-09-09  03:04     1'042'497'536 Files-System_inc_b3_s7_v1.tib
2016-09-10  03:04       753'983'488 Files-System_inc_b3_s8_v1.tib
2016-09-11  03:10    32'197'257'728 Files-System_full_b4_s1_v1.tib
2016-09-11  03:15    <DIR>          .
2016-09-11  03:15    <DIR>          ..
              10 File(s) 249'176'967'680 bytes
               2 Dir(s)  1'529'504'964'608 bytes free

Gerhard, did you try doing as Rob suggested earlier, i.e. mounting one of the large incremental backup images and then using a tool such as treesize free to check where the largest folder / file sizes are coming from?

The other suggestion would be to use the Windows 10 Disk Cleanup utility to remove any old Windows installation folders / files, including the Windows.OLD folders which can be 20 - 30 GB in size alone, assuming that you are not intending to revert back to Windows 7.  Open 'This PC' in Explorer, right-click on your OS drive then on Properties > Disk Cleanup > then take the option to clean System Files after the initial scan has completed.

And don't forget about defrag too - you never mentioend if you were defragging or not.  If you are defragging often, your incrementals can be just as big as the original since the defrag process moves the blocks of data around and those become changed blocks that Acronis will detect as being different and will backup those newly moved files the next time the backup is run.

Double check your defrag settings and do the mount test between 2 different incremenatals and use treesize to determine the folder/file size variations.  If you restore a disk and run a backup, that will be changed data too - cant' really say what the exact issue is in your case, but I can tell you that it's because the contents of your data have changed (at the block level) and Acronis is backing them up as a result.  

After the Windows 10 upgrade, you also end up with Windows.old (your old Windows) so your next backup will always have twice as much data in it because you have the Windows.old fodler with your old OS plus the new Windows OS with all of the same data - all of which was moved around on the disk during the "upgrade" process which changes the location of the data at the block level. 

If you set and forget the backup (don't keep opening the settings and then save changes), don't defrag, and have excluded large changing files like hiberfile.sys and pagefile.sys, your incrementals should remain relatively small (assuming you aren't making large data changes to your drive as well - like copying and moving folders, movies, etc around often).

Thanks for all your interest. Here a few fun facts:

• Defrag is set to once a month; my backups are once a day. It shouldn't affect 2 out of 3 incrementals.
• Hibernation, swap and page files together are some 15GB. They can't be responsible for a 102GB incremental backup.
• I have two drives (well, three, but two are in a RAID together). I'm only backing up the one, single, non-RAIDed drive that is the system drive. The RAIDed drives are my data drives (I back them up differently).
• This system drive that I back up has three partitions; one of them is the C: drive where Windows resides. The size of this is around 30GB, including the old Windows 7 files.
• While removing the old Windows 7 files is a good idea, and planned for anytime soon, these files should only affect the size of the full backup, not the incremental backups. With a total size of the full backup of 30GB, they certainly don't explain incremental backups of 50GB or even 100GB.
• I did do a check for the difference between the backups. There are a few differences, but again, not anywhere near 50GB or 100GB.

In short, with a total size of a full backup of 30GB, incremental backups of 50GB or 100GB are difficult to explain. Note that this is the backup of the system disk of a file-server type system where most of the data is on other disks that are not part of this backup.

Send us your service logs and compare the backups as suggested since you have the system and the ability to do this - no one else does.. Until then we're all just wasting time playing the guessing game.

The windows.old folder could easily be in an incremental and the next full too if it was created when an incremental was set to run. If you have entire pc  as the backup type and not a specific disk then you could be backing up more than expected on other disks too.

I won't devote more time to this unit you take the time to provide substantial information from multiple service logs, screenshots of all your backup task settings tab by tab  and the tree size comparison of two mounted incrementals where the size is as large as you say to identify where the increase lives between those backups. 

Thanks for your help.

I found what seems to be the culprit: Backblaze temporary files. Somehow a change in the handling of these seems to have coincided with the switch from Win7 to Win10 and the switch from an earlier version of True Image to True Image 2015 (because of the system update).

BTW, I didn't find any service logs, and neither did the log file viewer. I do have a monitor.log file of 420MB in C:\ProgramData\Acronis\TrueImageHome\Logs. Is this normal?

Gerhard, glad that you have found the cause for the large file sizes.

All the ATIH logs should be found in the C:\ProgramData\Acronis\TrueImageHome\Logs folder and I have seen the monitor log grow to GB sizes for some users!  There should be a Service....log for each backup task or validation activity that you perform so would be strange if there are none at all!