How get a listing of files/folders changed between various TIB backups?
For several years now I've been doing a full weekly backup of my C: drive (roughly 70 or 80 GB each) and a differential backup for the other six days of the week. I delete the weekly full backups after a month or two (leaving only a single full backup per month for a year or two, sometimes less).
I leave the daily differential backups for several weeks, then delete all of them except for the most recent week's differential TIB files. There's plenty of space on a 2 TB or 3 TB disk to follow this strategy.
Every now and again I notice the daily differential TIB files increase in size unexpectedly, and wonder what's changed on the C: drive to cause this. See this example.
For this reason, and as a more general requirement, I've wanted to list the folders/files that have changed. In fact, I want to be able to get a detailed change list between:
- Any two differential TIB files
- A particular daily differential TIB file and the most recent full backup TIB file
- Any two full backup TIB files
What goes for differential TIB files, same goes for incremental TIB files.
I haven't seen a tool to do this in True Image 2017 (or earlier versions). Is there a tool to generate such changed files/folders listings? If not, please Acronis develop such a tool ASAP and include it in the standard True Image product.
In risposta a You can try Treesize to do… di truwrikodrorow…
Good parallel thinking. However I've been using Treesize for quite a few years, and am quite familiar with it. and AFAIK it cannot produce a listing of the contents of a single TIB file let alone a difference listing for any two nominated TIB files.
A tool included in True Image that would give a difference listing would be a boon, since it would enable a user to quickly determine what has changed from one backup to another (and presumably would allow sorting by file size so that you could focus on the major contributors to backup file size increase).
There are tons of tools that compare file/folder changes, but I suspect none of them worul work with TIB files. Anyway, I want the tool built in, not yet another program to install and manage.
I would suggest opening the tib in Windows explorer which will do so as a mounted drive letter. Once you have done that then run TreeSize against the drive letter of the tib.
Yes, I do know that you can mount a single TIB as a virtual drive, and use Treesize (or similar) against that drive. But that is not what I want, and anyway it is messy and requires several other steps when I reckon that it should be a tool conveniently built into True Image.
THe sort of tool that I want is a bit like a duplicate file folder (as per www.google.com.au/search?q=duplicate+file+finder to see some third-party utilities) but it's more like folder compare utilities such as those shown by the following search: www.google.com.au/search?q=compare+two+folders+or+drives
And let me repeat that I reckon it should be a tool built into True Image to enhance its general file backup management capabilities and yield greater insights into the data that you're backing up. An inbuilt native non-third-party tool would be of great value, or "cool" if you prefer.
Compared with the complexity of True Image's main functions, adding such a tool should be relatively simple/inexpensive for Acronis to achieve. Are you monitoring this thread, Acronis? !!!
This feature is not available in most backup products - none in any of the Home backup products I have used. It would be very resource intensive to scan, compare and log each change at the file level. Most home backup products, work at the bit/block level - they don't care what the file(s) actually are, just look for changes at every bit and back those up.
I have seen some enterprise backup tools that provide this information, but not to the extent you're asking either - just the ability to view what's inside each backup as a list - these are much more costly though (generally over $1K for a single license).
None of the competing home backup products has the feature - I use several at home for testing and comparison (both free and paid versions). FYI, Windows, nor Windows VSS provides such a change log of files either - I think the recommendation to use treesize with mounted backups is about the best you're going to do at this price point.