Acronis True Image Home is filling hard drive with bloat
Hello:
I began trying to resolve this issue over on the old forums, but I'm still struggling, so am starting a new thread, here. Please forgive the palpable frustration in this post, but having to diddle with software, for weeks, is frustrating -- especially when that software is presented as easy to use. I would be grateful for the forum's help.
I'm using TIH 2009, build 9,709 under Windows XP Home with SP 3.
Here's the problem. I have several backups running under TIH. In some cases, the backups are roughly the same size as the original discs/partitions. In other cases, however, the backups are much larger than the originals. Yet I believe I have them all set up similarly. The size of several of the backups is now becoming a problem in that the disc drives containing them are filling up with the bloated buckup files.
I'll use one of the backups as an example.
I have a partition, which is drive D, being backed up into a folder on a much larger, external USB HD: drive I.
Drive D has a 250g capacity, of which 228g are used.
The backup folder, on Drive I, is now occupying 426g of disc space, and Acronis TIH is telling me that the disc is full every time it tries to run that backup task. (...which is frustrating, since it's TIH that has filled up the disc.)
My backup needs are simple and unsophisticated. I need a simple backup of the full partition. That's it.
I had set the backup to be incremental, scheduled daily, and to create a new backup after a number of days (with the option to remove old archives activated). Normal compression. Automatic consolidation when backups exceed 2. (I set this number low because I had already experienced problems with backup file proliferation, and I thought consolidation might help.)
I'm certain that there's an issue with the way I have set the backups up to run, but I can't sort out what I might be doing wrong, even after having read the beginner's guides, etc.
This problem is driving me around the bend, along with the need to spend time on support forums -- and now having been moved off of one forum and onto another. I purchased TIH after having used a simple shareware utility for years. I stepped up to TIH after reading several positive reviews. Yet, having only wanted simple, reliable backup, Acronis has been a frustration since the beginning. Having struggled with this problem for several weeks, I am beginning to regret purchasing TIH. I'm sure the product is great, but having to struggle with it isn't.
I would be grateful for help in resolving this issue.
Thank you, in advance.
Hi:
Answering your questions in order:
1. I am creating images of entire partitions/disks. In my original post, I was only using the word "backup" in its colloquial sense.
2. The disks have not been defrag'd between images.
3. No indexing programs are running that I'm aware of. ...and no database servers.
4. None of the drives/partitions have compression or BitLocker running.
5. NTFS vs FAT32: Interesting question, and not something I'd thought about. The origin disk used in the example quoted in my original post is formatted NTFS, but the drive to which I've been backing it up is formatted FAT32.
Other than going about getting all my disks formatted to NTFS, do you have any possible trouble-shooting suggestions?
--h
Two things that might relate to your problem are - occasionally TI is making sector by sector images or either of your drives have a bitmap problem.
The fact that the drive you image to is FAT32 should mean you just end up with a number of slices per complete image. Because of the way FAT32 works, the total disk spaced used will be more than if you had it formatted as NTFS. Converting the drive to NTFS would make it more efficient and if you wish to do so there is a convert utility that comes with XP and Vista to do that without losing your existing files.
I suggest that you run chkdsk /r on all your partitions/drives and see if it reports and fixes any bad sectors.
Thanks very much for that, Colin. It's a solid, sensible suggestion. I'll do that today.
That said, do you imagine that tweak could represent a 200% size ratio between the original and the backup?
I had the experience, on the Wilders forums, of getting suggests of things that were no doubt good ideas, but which didn't seem to address the heart of this problem.
I've been trying to get this problem fixed for a month, and I'm getting increasingly frustrated that I've paid for a product that simply doesn't seem to have any support to solve what should be a simple problem. In the meantime, I've got a product that simply isn't working.
I'm much obliged for the kindness of forum members, like yourself, of course, but I'm not impressed with Acronis at all.
Thanks, again, for the suggestion. --h
If bodgy's suggestions don't help, I'd run the backup manually and see if the size comes out correctly. I can't help with scheduling and consolidation issues because I don't bother with those features but I understand why they are important to some.
If you still have a problem, try turning off the compression. Seems weird but there used to be in previous versions a rare post about huge file size increases when trying to compress a lot of already compressed files. Normally, this isn't a problem and if the file grows it is by only a small amount.
Although TI normally handles FAT32 devices properly, lots of applications will report insufficient space on drive if trying to write a file greater than 4GB to a FAT32 device.
hi to everyone .. i'm a real newb and am getting 'bloat' like Houston.. i am also using an external drive (WD My Book) and it is Fat32, whereas my XP Pro is NTSF .. also when booting up i get a message that acronis loader is starting but it hangs on that black screen until i have to hold the power button on until it shuts the PC down .. then after a minute or so i turn it back on and it boots up normaly .. i confess to being an older guy who is slowly trying to learn all i can about this wondrous machine .. don't mean to hijack a thread but this was the closest topic to my problems .. thank you all .. dave
J David MacPherson:
Have you activated the Acronis Secure Zone, Acronis Start Manager or are you using the rescue CD? The Acronis loader is in Linux and is used by those programs, you shouldn't see that from within Windows.
I would suggest you definitely convert your external drive to NTFS using the Windows Converter utility, this will give you one contiguous image file per event, rather than a multiple of 4GB' files with their attendant bloat in the FAT entries.