what files were backed up in my incremental backup?
Subject line says it all.
I am doing a nightly incremental backup to my toaster HDD.
Is there some way to view what files were actually backed up on a given night?
W74
==> Incremental archive actually backups not files, but the changes made to the drive
is OP talking disk, partition or file backups?
Hi Yana. Your post clarifies things a little, but still, there's some uncertainty:
AS you probably know, there're a large holiday session in a first decade of January in Russia. Thus, none of the users was present here in the office and nobody did even touch the backed-up files.
BUT STILL - In a history of backups I see 4 in-a-row incremental backups with HUGE (in given circumstances) sizes - from 500 Mb to 3 Gb (see attachment). while NOBODY was able to even touch them in those days !
What can lead to such behaviour ? Windows Server 2003, ABR 10 Server for Windows.
I have recently discovered that my first incremental backup took a lot of space on my Windows 7 computer.
However, I discovered that Windows 7 as default has "Scheduled defragmentation is turned ON", and there had been a scheduled defragmentation after the full backup but before the incremental backup.
If looks like the incremental (or differential) backup do NOT backup CHANGED FILES ONLY.
Instead, if an automatic defragmentation has taken place between the full and the incremental backup, there can be a lot of changes on the sectors on the hard disk.
I think the only way to get a proper backup strategy is to TURN OFF windows scheduled defragmentation and ONLY defragment hard disks when it is necessary.
I hope this late comment will help Kirill M, and I also hope that Yana will comment my suggestion.
It is never necessary to defrag a harddisk. A hdisk and the file system can continue working 100% error free regardless of the number of fragments. So, defragging is not necessary.
What's worse, you will find that it is almost never useful to defrag a disk. The supposed utility comes from speeding up read/writes by reducing head movement and seek times. However, if you note the average access speed of your hdisk and do a little math, you'll find that even a huge file with an extraordinary number of fragments will be read only very slightly slower than if it was in one piece. On a file that takes several minutes or longer to read and is in a thousand fragments or so, defragging will gain you perhaps half a second. In exchange for that you spend all that time defragging and having your hdisk thrash around.
Suppose a sequential read (which is most likely to present a real world time savings with defragging) of 12 GB file on a machine such as the one I'm working on now and it is in 1,000 fragments. The read takes about 10 minutes. If I defrag into one piece the read will take 1,000 x 9ms = 9 secs less to read. Actually the diff won't be that big because a sequentially read file doesn't literally have zero access time but let's keep things simple. Defragging that file would take a few a much as several hours depending on what else is on the drive and what other progs are running, with the hard disk thrashing around at top speed the whole time. But if you were waiting 10 minutes for a file operation to complete, would 9 secs mean anything? More commonly one has much smaller files and many fewer fragments and the time savings is o the order of a few thousanths of a second. Is that worth the wear and tear on the hdisk?
On the pro side, staring at a defragger's screen can be more enjoyable than some of the stuff on TV, so it has that in it's favor. ;)
Thank you for this answer!
So from now on you can recommend every Windows 7 user to immediately after the installation of Windows 7:
=> Go to the Control Panel and disable "Scheduled defragmentation" for all hard disks.
And with defrag OFF there will no more be any problem with BIG incremental (or differential) Acronis backups.
I still dont understand why Microsoft by default install Windows 7 with "Scheduled defragmentation" enabled?
Especially SSD hard disks (system disks in newer computers) are not suitable for defrag at all!
I wonder whether Acronis would be the right instance to judge usefulness of defragmentation as such. I would assume operating system builders and driver/firmware programmers ( name it MS or Unix (icl. MacOS) would stand for more trust.
Truth out of daily experience is, that most of Windows machines, especially those who are short on diskspace (> 60% of capacity loaded with data), especially on the system disk, will noticably boot (and run) faster if defragmented once in a while (say every 3 months) ( or automatically as with last versions).
Why not just say: any data movement (incl. defragmentation) is recorded for backup and therefore increases size of incremental backup as Acronis does not backup filewise but sector-by-sector.
After reading many issues on the web about the sector based incremental (or differential) backup I think that everybody has to make his (or her) own decision how to handle defrag and backups.
By default Windows 7 is setup to defrag all hard disks at 1AM every wednesday every week.
This instruction was found in Acronis knowledge base about defrag and backup:
http://kb.acronis.com/content/2712
The recommendation is that the user should make a NEW full backup after the defrag. After the full backup it is possible to continue using incremental (or diffrential) before the next defrag.
The default Windows 7 schedule can of course be changed to longer periods (month instead of week).
Here is one discussion found on the web:
http://www.storagecraft.com/support/forum/defragmentation-and-increment…
The most important thing for me is to know how the defrag and backup work together.
I am satisfied with the information I have got so far.
From now on I do ONLY manual defrag when (or if) needed on my hard disks.
Also the Acronis manual backup will be the most suitable for me.
Defragging is never NEEDED .
After reading many issues on the web about the sector based incremental (or differential) backup I think that everybody has to make his (or her) own decision how to handle defrag and backups.
. . .
From now on I do ONLY manual defrag when (or if) needed on my hard disks.
. . .
[quote=Scott Hieber]Defragging is never NEEDED .
I did not say, defragmentation is NEEDED, but it is common use and recommendation to keep your system as speedy as possible. Note that with increased size of HDDs sector access time not necessarily has become smaller.
I was just wondering, why Acronis, having chosen the sector-by-sector-incremental backup as THEIR procedure is answering complaints just with the message 'Turn off defragmentation', which by the way I would expect as a warning note in the manuals....
Mea culpa.
Yeah. If you are going to defrag, then don't bother running an inc afterwards or just run fulls instead -- not that incs can't still save on file size, but not nearly as much as one might hope. Or, imo, skip the defrags and run whatever you want that serves your data integrity needs.
I think the reason Acronis uses the "sector method" is that it basically needs to ride under, so to speak, the OS and the file system, at the disk level, and things happen there in sectors. It's a pretty foolproof method of getting all changes. The biggest drawback is if you use a defragger or some other program that updates sectors even if file data isn't changed -- well, actually, not much besides defraggers do that. An alternative, e.g., is to use the file system archive bit to tell when contents have changed, but that proved unreliable (with false positives and negatives) even back in the DOS days when it was developed (or was it the old Unix days). ;)
Defraggin is mainly recommended by defrag makers and folks that haven't done the math. They all tell you it will make your machine faster but you'll notice they never tell you how much. It's like they say about state-run lotteries, they're just a tax on people that can't do math. ;)