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Space required for backkup drive

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I have used Acronis sporadically for years, primarily to change disk drives or computers.  I am now interested in using the new version to maintain the necessary information to restore complete systems.  I have three Windows 10 computers.  Two of them have 237 GB capacity on Drive C plus 931 GB on Drive D.  The third machine has just one 1.80 TB partition, Drive C.  From what I have read so far, I gather that files are compressed, but have not seen anything about the relationship between total space occupied on the computer drive and the space required on the backup medium. I need that in order to buy the appropriate media.

 

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Dwayne, welcome to these public User Forums.

The capacity of your 3 PC's is not really the main factor to consider here, it is the used capacity that you need to look at?

Just taking the largest of the PC's with the 2TB drive, how much of that drive is used and how much is free space?  Check the same for the other PC's.

Acronis typically achieves around a 20% compression when creating backups but this really depends on the mix of data involved.

Some files types are already highly compressed in their native format so cannot be compressed further, i.e. videos, music, pictures / photos.

Other files will compress much more than 20% such as text documents etc.

The other factors to consider for backup storage is how many copies of backup data will be stored, for how long etc.

Acronis offers different backup schemes that can be used.

Full backups take up the most space but are a required element of the other types, i.e. all backup schemes require an initial full backup to be created.

Incremental backups look only for changes since the previous backup was created, i.e. all changes since the initial full backup or since any subsequent increment backups, so these file sizes are typically smaller (depending on the degree of change occurring for the source data).

Differential backups look for all changes since the initial full backup, therefore they increase in size as new differential backups are created.

See Acronis article on The Ultimate Guide to Computer Backup for information on 3-2-1 backup strategy!

Steve, thank you for your response.  It helps a lot, but I am still needing to get some specific guidelines on storage capacity.

  • If I use USB flash drives for boot media, what capacity is required?
  • Can a complete image be stored on a flash drive if it is large enough?
  • I think  the largest amount of storage actually used on any of my computers is less than 200 GB. Should I get 3 1-TB drives and back up each one separately?  Or should I go to 2 TB?

The 3-3-1 strategy is quite worthwhile.  Thanks for your help

Dwayne

Dwayne, to answer your questions:

USB flash drives used for boot media typically only need to be 2GB (minimum) up to 32GB (maximum size).

I would not recommend storing backup images on a flash drive - in my experience they are much slower when used for this purpose.  An external USB 3.0 HDD is a better storage medium and can also be used as boot media by creating an Acronis Survival Kit partition (available with ATI 2019 and later versions).

The choice of number and size of drives depends on the strategy you intend to use.  Personally I have several 2TB HDD drives that I use for backups, plus I have a Synology NAS with 3TB of storage on my network, along with some older 1TB drives.

Dwayne, also consider that a lot of the used space on a drive need not be backed up... e.g., pagefile.sys, swapfile.sys, recycle bin, etc. There are a lot of exclusions as defaults for the disk backup tasks.

As an example, my C: drive full backup after exclusions and compression is about 55% of the actual used space on the drive. My D: backup, on the other hand, is about 83% the size on the drive itself. Your mileage may vary.

Are you planning to backup under Windows or use boot media? Think about whether you want to run backups simultaneously on the different PCs.