Why is my backup drive using more space than my C drive???

You have a few options, you can either backup 1) a full backup, 2) an incremental backup, or 3) differential backup. A full backup will generally be about 50% the size of your used space being backed up (depends on compressability of the files on the partition). Incremental and differential only backup the changes, so in theory they are smaller. When your backup disk fills its up to you to decide what to get rid of to make more space for future backups. Not sure exactly what your question is, do you expect to be able to backup indefinitely without your backup disk ever reaching capacity??

My suggestion is to only keep installed apps on the C: drive, keep all your data (including e-mail) on another partition. This will make your system backups as small as possible, allowing you to keep more system backups available if something goes wrong. As far as how often to backup either the system or data partitions, that's up to you based on how often you change things, and how recent of a recovery you want to be able to make. Since storage is cheap I rarely delete anything from my data partition, that way I can just keep a single latest backup image for that partition.

Last year I had a claimed virus that didn't get flagged by my AV until a couple months after the installation that supposedly infected my system, so you want to keep some older versions around just in case you have to go back in time by more than a few weeks.

Doug,
Thanks for your response!
What I'm asking is why the backup is over twice the size of the drive that I'm running Nonstop Backup?
Does Nonstop Backup not perform only incremental backups?
I just installed acronis two weeks ago and it is filling up my drive to fast in my opinion.
I want full protection but it appears I will need a 10 T drive at this rate. My C drive has around 98 G used space and I don't understand why backup drive has used over 200 Gig in less than two weeks.

I have seen running a defrag creates this problem as it creates changes. I use Diskeeper who warn its incompatible with Trueimige. But I have no problems just creating a full image, anything else becomes big! The same problem exists I think with MS defragmentation, I think you have very large files as a result of running it as well. As I understand it this has been a long standing issue and I don’t know if other imaging programs suffer from it as well.

I assume that I should learn how to disable MS defrag from running on my backup drive.
Wonder if anyone else on forums is running Nonstop backup and what is the difference between C drive and backup drive used space size??

WD Zajac wrote:

Doug,
Thanks for your response!
What I'm asking is why the backup is over twice the size of the drive that I'm running Nonstop Backup?
Does Nonstop Backup not perform only incremental backups?
I just installed acronis two weeks ago and it is filling up my drive to fast in my opinion.
I want full protection but it appears I will need a 10 T drive at this rate. My C drive has around 98 G used space and I don't understand why backup drive has used over 200 Gig in less than two weeks.

Sorry, read right past the part about nonstop backup, so my original comments are not applicable to your situation at all. The other reply regarding defrag is one of the common reasons that incremental grows unexpectedly. I personally do simple manual backups because a large majority of the trouble you see on this forum is with the advanced features that automate things for you, as you are experiencing first hand. Murphy's law is quite applicable with disk imaging and backup, so I keep it as simple as possible to avoid problems later on.

Have you tried doing a dry run restore using images created by nonstop backup? If not then when you actually need to do it because of a problem, you may be in for an even larger disappointment.