Differential Image Size has jumped dramatically with little to no changes on Drives....
I noticed this the other day as I was getting ready to swap out External Hard Drives. The first few image sizes for our Differentials were from around 4 - 10GBs an image, then all of a sudden they jumped to between 20-30GB per image. These are Differential Images that should just be collecting changes...... I'm just wondering if this is normal for the product or if I have reason for concern.

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Mark:
I did defrag the system during that timeframe (usually try to do it about once a month on all the PCs here), but would it keep that size difference or should it just be a one time thing? The Diffs went from a steady 8 months of about 4-10GBs in size to that big jump in image size for 2 months up to today. If it would help I could get some screenshots of the older files and the newer ones to show you what I mean.
Thanks
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Robert:
Differential images are based on the changes from the original full image, so once they increase in size the next differential should also be as large or larger. Was there anything else that changed during the last 2 months? Major Windows updates, new software installation, etc.?
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Mark:
Nothing software related and the standard updates here or there. Very few changes as we are limited on space right now. We are planning to implement a 8TB NAS shortly to deal with this issue. I've just never noticed the images that huge before. I just wanted to make sure it wasn't an issue. All the Logs and Reports say the images are verified and went through successfully. I guess I should just start planning on the images being bigger from now on. I'll run through the Event Viewer and the TI Logs and see if there is anything I might have missed.
Thanks for your help.
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Robert:
If you make a new full image then subsequent differential images should again be smaller. The farther away you get (in time) from the base image, the larger the differential image will be.
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Mark:
Well I have it setup to do a Full Backup every Saturday and then Differentials for the rest of the week. What I found, was that apparently the last FULL it was seeing was a DIFF file from 9/16/2009 and was counting all the changes from that. Even though the FULL was still being made every Saturday. I rebuilt the catalog and it seems to be functioning at a smaller size again. Apparently even though I had the files seperated into 2 different folders, they need to be in the same directory to function properly.
Thanks for all of your help.
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