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System backup vs. incremental backup

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I recently upgraded to True Image Home 2009 and used the default System Backup option.  But I already have scheduled incremental backups from before I upgraded.  My incremental backup has been set up to back up after having created an image of my entire computer.  My first system backup to my external hard drive took a few hours and was successful, but a scheduled repeat system backup failed because of lack of disk space.  My scheduled incremental backup occurred without errors.  What is a system backup, how does it differ from the image of the entire computer that I had already created, and what should I do from here?

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Hello Kirk,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Could you please clarify, what do you mean under system backup? Backup of system partition or System State Backup? 

System State Backup is file level backup of system files and drivers, so it does not take much space...

Thank you.

It might be easier for you to keep things simple. Do full only backups if the source drive is not very large and do  full/incs or full/diffs if the disk is larger. Then you can always put the disk back the way it  was at whatever times for which you have backups.  The System State backup isn't going to get your programs but it will get all the "hives" (i.e., files) that make up the Registry data (along with other Operating System files)--although I wouldn't want restore OS files without restoring program files from the same moment in time. Thus, I'd rather restore the whole disk/partition.

It's easy to get complicated with backups, but when it comes time to restore, what are you going to want and need to restore and how reliable do you want the restoration? With full backups, you sidestep that question by jsut rstoring everything and knowing it will all work together as well as it did when you made the backup.

Scott Hieber wrote:

It might be easier for you to keep things simple. Do full only backups if the source drive is not very large and do  full/incs or full/diffs if the disk is larger.     ...    With full backups, you sidestep that question by jsut rstoring everything and knowing it will all work together as well as it did when you made the backup.

Amen to that! Another case where the hard way is really the easy way.

Let me start from the beginning. What I want to do is to image my hard drive to my external drive, including all data files, system files, registry, etc. I assume I did that by doing recently doing a "Full Backup"after upgrading from Acronis True Image 9.0 to Acronis True Image Home 2009. Is that correct? I have it set up, or think I did, the program to then perform incremental backups.

Because creating the new Full Backup after upgrading caused me to run out of space on the external hard drive, I deleted all previous incremental backup files since last Full Backup earlier this year, but I cannot delete the Full Backup from earlier this year, which I don't need. I get an error message saying that the file is being used by another person or program. How do I delete the old Full Backup in order to make space on my external hard drive?

Also, what does mount and unmount mean? Despite recent improvements, I have never found Acronis backup as intuitive as it should be.