Space required for backkup drive
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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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
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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.
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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.
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