Backup Size Larger than Partition Size
I've done a number of single full backups and I'm trying to figure out why when I backup my 931 GB SSD drive, I'm getting a backup file that is 1436 GB size or about 1.5 times large than the drive, especially when Windows shows only 614 GB is bing used with 316 GB available.
Even before I do a backup the Acronis software shows the "Entire PC" size at 1.3 TB
Why should the Acronis backup file be larger than the partition it is backing up?
Thank you for pointing that out. Somehow I missed what now seems obvious.
Your welcome.
In hindsight it was easy to miss for a new user, even though I had seen it before. It would have been hard to miss if there was a "Select Sources" button instead of nothing, unless you happen to hover your mouse over the entire PC Window.
Something else I haven't figured out is why both before and after I backed up my 612 MB used 931 MB C Drive the Destination box says 471 GB out of 1,863 GB Free on my Backup Drive even though Windows now reports 532 GB Used and 1.29 TB Available on the 1.81 TB Backup Drive.
There also dosen't seem any way to show a summary of all your backup settings. I was surprised the other day when my overnite backup failed to complete because my computer went to sleep after I was sure I had set the Prevent Computer from going to Sleep/Hibernate Option. After setting it last evening I was also surprised to see that Acronis had also set a couple of other related options unknown to me even though they seem reasonable.
The email notification is a useful feature, although several times I've had "insufficient free disk space" warning when I was expecting Acronis to automatically delete the old file, and later found out that the backup had stalled.
In hindsight it was easy to miss for a new user, even though I had seen it before. It would have been hard to miss if there was a "Select Sources" button instead of nothing, unless you happen to hover your mouse over the entire PC Window.
Agreed. I guess you get used to it after the first time, but it could be clearer since users may not hover over the icon and see the option to change it until they do.
Something else I haven't figured out is why both before and after I backed up my 612 MB used 931 MB C Drive the Destination box says 471 GB out of 1,863 GB Free on my Backup Drive even though Windows now reports 532 GB Used and 1.29 TB Available on the 1.81 TB Backup Drive.
I'd guess that Acronis is estimating actual file space vs comptressed .tib format space based upon what is currently on the C: drive. By default, Acronis will also filter certain files in the backup such as hiberfil.sys, recycle.bin, pagefile.sys, and whatever else is listed in your exclusions. Also, all Acronis backups use "normal" compression by default so the estimate from the original sort and the final compression output will vary and I doubt there is an alogirthm to accuratley determine what the actual oupt will end up being.
There also dosen't seem any way to show a summary of all your backup settings. I was surprised the other day when my overnite backup failed to complete because my computer went to sleep after I was sure I had set the Prevent Computer from going to Sleep/Hibernate Option. After setting it last evening I was also surprised to see that Acronis had also set a couple of other related options unknown to me even though they seem reasonable.
Yes this was removed in ATIH2015 and remains in 2016. Bringing back better logging and notifications has been voiced a lot. It is a very active topic in the MVP program and we are hoping to see some big changes in ATIH2017, but time will tell if we do or not. I can't say why Acronis could not wake up the system. I have trouble with this under other applications and in general with hibernation at times. Not sure what other options you saw changed though.
The email notification is a useful feature, although several times I've had "insufficient free disk space" warning when I was expecting Acronis to automatically delete the old file, and later found out that the backup had stalled.
Automatic cleanup must be configured by the user. It will not cleanup space to make room for new backups automatically. If you are using cleanup tasks, keep in mind that how you set them up determines how often the cleanup task will run. For instance, if you have a simple weekly backup plan with 1 full and 6 incrementals, that is = 1 version chain. Assuming you want 4 weeks of backups to be retained and you use the "keep no more than 4" version chains option, you will get 4 full version chains. Then the next full backup would run so you'd have to have enough room for it and once that full completes, then the 1st version chain would get removed. A lot of people forget to account for the next full backup needing to complete before the cleanup will occur.
Hello
This post was (is) very useful to me. I was desperate in front of this empty window. I couldn't imagine Acronis was that stupid not showing an estimate of the Backup Size. Searching the help files I found the this problem exists since the beginning.
Reading this post I got the idea to delete the backup name top left of the window that Acronis took from an old backup.
Then every thing was clear. Included a Backup Size
Now I will spend some more time to click on each icon until I now them fully. Since I'm French this is extra difficult for me. Why don't you use this empty window to put some text instead of imaging new program to add to Acronis?
Reading that post, I expect now some more problems, a lot of guessing and a lot of time studying the help files.
Exhausting.
I bought Acronis 2016 because I expected a lot of improvement and clarity.
Unfortuneately the Acronis True Image user interface appears to be yet another example of form over function, style over substance. The functionality is mostly there , but without an intuative or even logical user interface. And as I've mentioned above, there's no way to provided a summary of your settings, to make sure everything is set the way you intended.
The best action that you can take at this point is to use the Feedback tool (found in the Help section) to pass your comments and frustrations with the user interface and any other aspects of the product to the Acronis development team. The more users that do this, the more likely that they may actually listen and produce the product that we want them to provide.
This forum is great to get help from other users of the same product but there is no guarantee that the Acronis developers will read through the hundreds of posts that show here every day. We do get some Acronis engineers that respond to user posts, but the majority of responders are other users like yourselves or user volunteers like the MVP's.
@Jmac I had a similar issue with just one partition and really just choosing one partition. A broken NTFS may also cause unexpectably long backup and (later) restore times as well as bigger backups. Mostly in this case the MFT bitmap is inconsistent, but glad you issue wasn't that deep under the hood.
I just posted it for the sake of completion.
Hi,
I've the same problem with Acronis True Image 2017 Recovery CD: I would like to backup C: partition only and not the whole disk.
Sometimes Acronis backups the C: partition but very often creates much larger backup of the whole hard drive.
I've not idea how to control it. I can't find the corresponding option, I don't see the icon Entire PC which you are speaking about.
Perhaps it somehow depends from file name which I chose as target?
Could you please clearyfy this problem?
kind regards,
JL
Acronis will default to a sector by sector backup if any dirty/bad sectors are detected on the disk. You may wank to run chkdsk /f /r on the source drive. I'd also actually recommend a full disk tool like WD datalifeguard or seatools which are booth free and will check the entire disk and not just the C: partition.
This might be the case but it still won't handle NTFS issues correctly or is able to run something similar like chkdsk prior a backup or restore which still leads in unpredictable restores measured in time and results.
Often enough they will fail after a long time of waiting or visually working process.
@Bobbo_3C0X1: you are right, it was bad sector problem, in a log I've found "Forced sector-by-sector mode"
At least you know now. Hopefully
chkdsk /f /r
will resolve it. It should, unless the bad sector is in an umounted volume. If chkdsk /f /r doesn't work on it's own, you would either have to mount the other volumes with diskpart (use "assign" to give them all a drive letter and run chkdsk /f /r then), or use something like WD datalifeguard or seatools which should do the entire disk and both are free.
I think I have a similar but slightly different issue:
I have successfully been running Acronis True Image 2016 for a few months with a daily incremental backup (1 full + 6 incremental = one week). The full images have been approximately 27Gb, with incrementals about 3 Gb. The disk (Crucial SSD) itself is only 60Gb. Recently it has failed to make a daily backup according to schedule.
Now it shows an estimated file size of 236Gb, an order of magnitude larger, and nearly triple the actual size of the disk. It will not complete a back up, either by manually backing up, or according to schedule (1:00 AM run time).
I will run checkdisk ( chkdsk /f /r ) but that doesn't seem to explain why the image size would be far larger than the source (i.e. a sector-by-sector backup image should not be appreciably larger than the physical size of the source).
Griffin, welcome to these User Forums.
When we have seen similar problems to that described in your post above, it has tended to be caused by a file system error, perhaps in the Master File Table or in the record of free space for the drive, so you do need to do a CHKDSK to see if this will correct the problem.