Shrinking Backups
I've been using TI Home 2009 since July 09. The primary partition of my hard drive contains 17.6 gb of data. In July and August the backups were between 14 GB and 15 GB. Starting in September they've gone from 10.8 GB down to 10.2 GB. Since the amount of data on the partition has remained fairly constant, I'm wondering what would cause the backups to become 33% smaller.
Windows XP SP3. Partition size is 27.5 GB
I did turn off System Restore recently for another partition which is using 35 GB out of 47 GB.
Turning off System Restore on a partition will delete all restore points on that partition. There may have been a lot of restore points, so this is one explanation for why the size of your backups may have changed.
If you have an old (larger) backup and a newer (smaller) backup, mount each of them and compare. You should be able to see where the differences are. The restore points will be in the System Volume Information folder for each partition.
I am unable to open or right-click on the folder _restore{C8Dxxx......} Also, the file size is blank.
Edward:
Are you looking at the folder from a mounted image file? If you're looking at your current disk, Windows will block access to that folder and the file size spec being reported will be blank.
When I mount the image file, I can't see the System Volume Information folder. If I explore the backup, the folder is visible in the tree but I can't access it.
Edward:
I just tried a quick test. When exploring the backup I was able to view the contents of the System Volume Information folder. If you set Windows Explorer to "Details" view then you can see the size of each file in the file size column. However, if there are a lot of files then this is tedious.
Mounting the image is more convenient since you can then use all of the features of Windows Explorer. To be able to view the contents of the System Volume Information folder when mounted you need to "Take Ownership" of the folder. To do this, mount the image as read/write. When you do this, TI will create an incremental image file to record the changes that you make. The original .tib file is not modified. When you have finished you can delete the newly-created incremental file.
Here are the steps:
1. Right-click on your image file and choose "Mount"
2. Select "read/write"
3. Browse to the System Volume Information folder. Right-click on the folder and choose "Properties"
4. Go to the Security tab. If you don't see a security tab then change Windows Explorer settings (Tools > Folder Options > View) and uncheck "Use simple file sharing"
5. Take Ownerhip of the mounted image drive (Advanced button > Owner tab > click on your user > also check "Replace owner on subcontainers and objects" > Apply > Yes > OK)
Now you can do whatever you want in the System Volume Information folder. Remember, no changes are being made to your image file; any change will be instead written to the incremental image file being created, and you can delete it after unmounting.
That did it. I've gone from 59 restore points down to 6. Thanks very much for you help!
Good! Mystery solved...