Hi, Does anybody here understand the eternal mysteries of Acronis True Image - specifically, it's system of 'incremental' back-ups and so on? I've flirted with ATI over the years, as the idea of a 'fail safe' back-up system is obviously attractive - and sensible. However, every time I've used it I've found that the back-ups created by ATI get completely out of control and quickly threaten to consume all my hard drive space, and I end up uninstalling it. Very frustrating! Anyway, three days ago I thought I would have another go. So I created a Acronis Secure Zone all on default settings, which came to 35.9 GB. I then did an incremental back-up of my 27.8 GB system partition (the C drive) on default settings, so it was compressed down to 15 GB. Naturally, I placed the back-up in the Secure Zone and scheduled it for a daily 'incremental' back-up at 9.00 am (and I also activated Acronis Start-up Recovery Manager, the 'F11 option', and a made a Bootable disc). Thus, the next day - as instructed - Acronis made a back-up at 9.00 am. So far, so good. However, I noticed that the 'incremental' back-up made by Acronis was a massive 6.08 GB, which I find somewhat inexplicable since I hadn't installed anything else on my C drive during those 24 hours. How come the back-up was so big? I also noticed that Acronis was telling me in red letters (already!) that there was "not enough free space" in the Secure Zone - even though it had told me that the back-up had being "successful". And then the next morning the 'incremental' back-up was another 4.97 GB, bringing into a total of 26.08 GB - meaning that within 48 hours the size of the back-up made by Acronis was almost as big as the original target drive (ie, 27. GB). At this rate, of about 5 GB a day, my 'incremental' back-ups will amount to some 165 GB or more! Does anybody know why this is happening? Is there some mysterious setting, or option, that I've managed to overlook - despite going over it on near countless occasions? Obviously, I know there are 'differential' back-ups - but they are supposed to take up more room than Incremental back-ups, so I don't find that a particularly alluring idea. Any help or advice would be most appreciated, Thanks, DANNY O'DARE
Make sure you exclude your pagefile, hibernation file and any temporary file directories. The paging & hibernation files could be multiple GB each. Also consider only backing up two things to your secure zone: 1) a complete system image which gets overwritten each time and 2) your data (and only your data) on an incremental schedule. Are you using the single version or version chain backup scheme? Edit: lots of useful stuff here: http://forum.acronis.com/forum/3426
Hi, Thanks for your quick response, Fingers. How exactly would I "exclude" the page file, hibernation files, temp files, etc? Do you mean just do 'manual' Full back-ups of my system drive from time to time? If so, with or without scheduling, etc? "Single version or version chain back up scheme?" I'm afraid I do not entirely understand the question - could you clarify a bit more? Many Thanks, DANNY
Basically, what Fingers said. It's probably been the fault of having the Page file and temporary file directories included in your backup schedule that has caused the problems. I use Acronis True Image for lots of things, including a weekly OS drive image backup, daily incremental data backups and drive mirroring. The only difference between my setup and yours is that I'm probably backing up a lot more data on a regular basis (OS drive is 240GB solid state storage, data is over 700GB) and they're going to a server over the network. Other than that, we use it for the same thing and my incremental backups are nowhere near as large as yours. Not that it would really matter, as they're going to a large file server, but it's still important for me to make sure it's only backing up what is necessary to reduce the task time.
Whilst I reckon that the pagefile, hibernation file and temp files SHOULD be automatically excluded, there should be an "exclude" option somewhere in the software. I have the 2010 version but am at work so can't look for it now. I would suggest a sytem image (to allow recovery) on a less regular schedule than a data backup. This way you could have a single compressed system image on the secure zone and overwrite it each time you refresh it. Your data backup would simply be that, a data backup and you could choose a full, differential or incremental depending on your requriements. Re: backup schemes: http://kb.acronis.com/content/13656#
Sorry, I'm also using the 2010 version, not sure what changes have been made in the '11 version but probably not that many, the option to exclude PF and Hibernation files should still be in there somewhere.
OK, I'll check out the options again. Indeed, I might start all over again! Have to admit, I got quite confounded by all the options - full, incremental, differential, custom, single version, chain version, etc. I do not find ATI 2011 particularly easy to use or understand, to be frank. Cheers, DANNY
