Incremental Backups taking up huge amounts of space

Sean, welcome to these User Forums.

What options have you selected for your Acronis backup task of your SSD?

Please check the task Options > Advanced page and ensure that you have not selected to use Sector by Sector for the backup image creation mode for the task.  If you take this option, then it can create a backup of a size similar to the raw size of the source disk drive.

Next, check that you have kept the default Exclusions that Acronis sets for backup tasks, i.e. that you are not including files such as the Windows pagefile.sys, hiberfil.sys, swapfile.sys or the System Volume Information folders - these alone can add significantly to backup sizes and are not required.

If your SSD data size is only 145GB then I would expect a full backup to be approximately around the 100GB size when using the set exclusions and compression levels.

You may want to try mounting your backup image in Windows Explorer to a drive letter and then using a tool such as the TreeSize Free to see where all the extra space is being consumed?

I don't have sector-by-sector enabled.

How do I mount my backup image to a drive?

Right click on the .tib file. Choose Acronis True Image-->Mount

When I right-click and select mount I get a brief pop-up that says 'mounting image' and then nothing else happens and no drives mount?

Sean, given the size of your backup images and their location on your NAS, then it may take a little time for the mount to be fully actioned.  Have you checked to see if there are any new drive letters showing in Explorer?

yeah...even after reboot and even uninstalled and reinstalled ATI - waited hours and nothing has mounted.

My NAS is connected via gigabit ethernet and data moves back and forth at around 100MB/s so no bandwidth/bottlenecking on that front...

I think I'm just going to nuke all the backups and start fresh and see if it keeps ballooning up again?  Would be nice to be able to mount the images as you describe so I could inspect with treesize free (which I have installed and have been using for many many year - great utility).

Sean, just one further question which I should have asked earlier, but what type of backups are involved here, are they Disks & Partitions or are they Files & Folders?  Only the former can be mounted as a drive letter but both types can be opened by double clicking in File Explorer.

Thanks for all your help, btw.

It's a full disk/partition of my C: drive.  I have another backup method for my files/folders so I'm just relying on Acronis for snapshot my main operating system so I can restore/recover in the event of software issues primarily.

Ok, any disk/partition backup image should be able to be mounted to a drive letter.  I have just tested this with a disk backup stored on my own Synology NAS and this was mounted fine though it did take a few minutes to do so across a wireless (Powerline) connection for a 5GB Vista OS partition to mount.

hrmm...I wonder what's wrong with my ATI install and how to fix it....I might start a new forum post since this had drifted off the original topic

You could try a repair installation. Download the full installer from your Acronis account, run it and when asked, select repair.

Yup - just tried that - cannot get images to mount for love nor money.  Chatted with support and they said download/repair as well  Losing hope on being able to fix this mounting issue.

Rapidly running out of options. Only extreme measure left. Uninstall ATI 2017, then run the clean-up tool. This will nuke all your backup task settings, so you should back them up first.

I found the following instructions on how to back up settings by Steve Smith (applies to ATI 2016 but will work with ATI 2017).

Whilst there is no direct method of exporting / importing your backup task configuration data, you can do this in an indirect way as follows:

Open C:\ProgramData\Acronis\TrueImageHome\ in Windows Explorer - this may be hidden on some systems - if so, go to the Folder option in the View pane and enable hidden files & folders).  Save a copy of the Database and Scripts folders to another location to restore back later if needed.

Note: In order to restore the above folders & contents, you must stop all Acronis Services & Programs else you will encounter locked files in the Database folder.

OK - so it's an issue with the mounting from the synology.  I just moved the entire backup archive to an internal drive and it will mount.  However, it won't mount over the network share.  I also mapped the synology to a drive letter to see if that would make a difference and it did nothing.

Double checked permissions and I have full-control over my backup directory on the synology

Out of interest, ref the Synology NAS - how are you accessing the backup images?

I do not map anything to my Synology NAS and when I did my test, the way I did this was as follows:

I launched the main ATIH GUI and located my backup task to the NAS.

Next, I took the option to Open location which launched an Explorer window to the NAS folder which then used the correct credentials stored by ATIH for this access.

Then I took the option to Mount the image from that Explorer and this was fine for me.

When you say 'Explorer' window - do you mean Windows Explorer or the file explorer inside the ATIH GUI?  The only place I have been able to find a 'mount' option is through Windows Explorer and whether I invoke a windows Explorer window through the network share or via ATIH has no effect.  I get the pop-up that says initializing and then it disappears.  Only if I move the entire .tib file to an internal drive am I able to get past the initialize stage where it invokes the mount wizard and offers drive letters to carry through with the mount.

Perhaps some screen shots will explain things easier...

I haven't had much luck mounting from a remote share either.  I typically have to move it to a USB or internal drive - probably something to do with the permissions (as can be seen if you try to robocopy from a Windows share to a Linux share which requires a switch to not try to set the same permission on the remote share).

As for the original issue... Once it is mounted, use treesize free or mindgems folder size free and have it show the size of files and folders on C.

My hunch is that it's backing up your system restore points and that has grown out of control, or you may have a Windows update (this appears to be Windows 10) that "doubled" the size of your C: drive by leaving Windows.old around and changing the partition scheme of your drive - causing a new incremenal to be huge.  The fact that these are remaining large though, makes me think it's more the restore points though (system volume information folder on the C: drive - you can't view the content in Windows, but treesize free will show you the folder and its true size).