ATIH 2012 New User: few questions...

Hi ... I'm a former user of Driveimage XML; I've just recently upgraded to the Acronis product as I desire a tad more flexibility with a new system I've built.

My main use is doing once a week (or less) *manual* full system images...IE...no scheduling and no incremental backups. Simply to store a redundant image set offline for restore on the rare chance I might need to do so. Driveimage XML's simplicity is attractive to me as I prefer a manual approach to creating images, yet it's RAID support is lacking and I'm a dedicated RAID 0 user; therefore my purchase of Acronis (which I understand to have excellent RAID support).

Anyway, I did my first image last night, choosing what I thought were the obvious choices in the backup configuration screen. The image process went off without a hitch. But there is one thing that seems weird to me. I'll explain below:

I imaged a 1.2 TB drive. This drive contains only 300GB of data; however, my backup set is reported by Windows 7 (file exlorer/properties) as being, roughly, 830GB. I was expecting the backup set to be about the same size as the data set existing on the drive, or perhaps smaller since I used the default compression.

- I was also sure to select "single version scheme" under the backup scheme setting.
Also