Incremental Backups

Questions to ask. How far apart in time are the incrementals ? and do you have any form of auto defragmentation running (such as Windows own or some 3rd party program). Any defrag will cause large backups to be created. Also remember windows is constantly shuffling files around.

I do daily incremental backups on a 160Gb W7 partition of which only 30Gb is used. My initial image is around 14Gb and dailys are in the 0.3 to 1.5Gb range. The 1.5 GB was after a disk clean and browser cache clean.

http://sdrv.ms/VpXssG

So if I am reading your figures correctly your incremental is around 45Gb ? so that is huge.

Thanks for prompt reply.

1. Incrementals were 1 month apart
2. I have Diskeeper (defrag. app.) running.

Will try a backup without defrag. running in background.

Regards,
Sellick

1 month apart is an eternity for an operating system. My incrementals are never more than 24 hours apart and these take around 2 to 3 mins to run daily. Thats the whole point of them. Doing this you are never more than 24 hours from a known up to date image.

Defragmenting works like this. Imagine all the books on all the shelves in a library and you have just made an image of them. Thats your base image. Now the defragmenter decides that it will move half the books up the shelf to take up the free space left by just one book being removed. Although to you nothing much has changed... to Acronis everything is now in a different location... and thats why the incremental images are so large.

Once again, many thanks for your continued and prompt assistance.
May I infer from your comment that a daily incremental would allow me (with some increased time) to keep my defrag. running? This is the recommended default for Diskeeper.

Regards.

Your welcome :)

Now any defragmenter that runs between incremental backups will increase the file size of the Acronis images. There's no escape from that. I would say that all you can do is try it and see. A lot depends how aggresive Diskeeper is.

If you are running W7 or Vista then fragmentation isn't the problem it once was. If you look at the image in the link I posted above you'll see I do monthly/weekly/daily backups starting a new incremental sequence off every week and finishing with a "full" month end backup.

I don't really favour 3rd party disk housekeeping tools and prefer to use Windows own. I have defragmentation turned OFF and perform a manual (run on my command) as and when.

Another thought... Windows system restore creates large files (certainly over a month) and these would be reflected in the backups. Again like the defragmenter, I have system restore turned off relying totally on my Acronis backups.

Good stuff.
Thanks.