Getting no compression from True Image 2010
I just installed True Image 2010 on my new Windows 7 drive and ran full system backup. Although I selected normal compression level, the resulting tib file was almost the same size as the data on my disk (~7% smaller, to be exact). On my old Vista disk, however, a similar backup would achieve roughly 30-40% compression. I am puzzled as to what is going wrong here. The bulk of my data is raw picture files or Photoshop .psd files, but I think those should compressible by more than 7%, no? Besides, the Vista drive contained pretty much the same data, and the compression levels were much higher. Anybody else experienced the same issue?
Yes, the files are pretty much the same, except I probably went from about 250GB of photos to $270GB or so. The only thing I can think of that could account for the difference is Vista recovery space that is not present (I think) in Windows 7 -- that's probably 70GB or so. Otherwise, I have done all the things you had suggested (thank you) and both the TI log file and chkdsk results look good. Backing up from a recovery CD produces the same file size.
I also tried t zip a few random folders to get some examples of the compression level and the results ranged from 10 to 30% compression.
Actually I have been noticing that my Images are not much less than the used space on the drive I'm backing up ever since I started using 2010 build 5055. I don't have much at all in the way of pics, and I have no music nor movies at all. I haven't tried to find out why as I have a 1Tb drive for the Images and my Images average 30Mb. Plus the important thing is that they restore correctly, which they do.
With previous versions the Images would be about 60% to 70% of the used space.
I did a backup from a 500 gb hdd yesterday and I have almost the same 'problem', about 5% compression only (mixed data). any news about this?
No, no news -- I am still getting negligible compression when doing backups. Not sure if it's a flaw in the program or something else.
I would like to try an older version of TI (I use 2010 home) to see if there is a difference, the problem is that TI 2009 don't work at my computer (sata issues which 2010 fixed).
did anybody else wonder about this? I'm not saying that we have a problem her, it's just very strange that I never noticed something like that in older versions.
I have recently noticed that I am getting no compression. I upgraded to TI Home 2010 (on Windows XP) a few of months back. I definitely saw significant compression on earlier versions, including 2009.
I tried reverting to 2009 (which still works happily on my system) ... but still no compression! I've checked my file system (chkdsk /f) and have ensured I have not selected "backup sector-by-sector" in TI, but still no compression.
This is odd. Has anyone any idea what may be causing the problem?
Hello all,
MudCrab and DwnNDrty, thanks for your help.
Jonr, Mike L and Acrojez, in order to investigate the issue I need some additional information from you.
Could you please let me know the following?
- amount of data backed up;
- size of the created archive;
- type of data (music, pictures, video, etc).
We are looking forward to hearing back from you at your earliest convenience.
Thank you.
Hi Ilya,
In my case the backup involves a Windows XP system/applications partition (c. 29.8GB) and a data partition (c. 54.6GB). The data partition contains a mixture of miscellaneous documents, application data, photos (18GB) and a few small videos. The last archive was 76GB, so there is a bit of compression here (I didn't realise I'd got so much data now), but I used to see 30-40% compression. Does this latest figure look right?
Thanks for your interest.
Hello Acrojez,
Thanks for the clarification.
In your case compression is reasonable if you're using a Normal compression level in Backup Options.
Thank you.
Ilya, I stand corrected then. Many thanks for checking anyway.
Regards.
I'm having the same issue, even with compression set to max. I'm trying to compress 1.45 GB of data, and the backup comes out to be 1.49 GB. Now, with max compression, how is the backup larger than the original files, especially with compression set to max....?
95% of the files are videos and the remaining 5% are audio. It estimates 700ish mbs to compress it, but that ends up not evening being close by 50%
Video, audio, photos are all already in a compressed format. These type files will not compress much further than already compressed. This is not the fault of any backup program--just the nature of the file types.
It is not common but certainly not unheard of for a second round of compression on already compressed files to yield larger filesizes.
I have also seen that I am getting almost zero compression using NORMAL.
I have Vista 32bit Home Premium.
My source data is on a NAS drive (Unix based OS XFS file format) and is 5.18 GB of Word documents and PDF files. When I run ATI 2009 and store the Tib file back onto a SATA HDD drive (Vista 32bit NTFS file format), I get 5.05 GB in Normal compression. I suppose it has something to do with Unix XFS vs Vista NTFS file formats.
Word documents since Office 2007 are essentially .zip files, and pdf documents are compressed too - they can't be compressed significantly any further.
I am still using Word 2002, but I get your point, thank you.