How often do you back up?

Happychappy

Hi

I have a 300gb external hard drive and Acronis true image. I originally backed up the C drive which is 70gb last October, out of the 70gb available, I have used around 52gb, I then backed it up again in Dec 06, this time using the incremental back up, and again today.

I find the external drive is now down from 300gb to only 90gb, I was expecting it would only keep backing up whatever had changed. Clearly it is making a fresh back up each time. I find the Acronis help files a bit difficult, am I doing this right or is there a more simplified way. I can delete the whole of the external drive and start again if necesary

Thanks

pauldreed

Happychappy wrote:

Hi

I have a 300gb external hard drive and Acronis true image. I originally backed up the C drive which is 70gb last October, out of the 70gb available, I have used around 52gb, I then backed it up again in Dec 06, this time using the incremental back up, and again today.

I find the external drive is now down from 300gb to only 90gb, I was expecting it would only keep backing up whatever had changed. Clearly it is making a fresh back up each time. I find the Acronis help files a bit difficult, am I doing this right or is there a more simplified way. I can delete the whole of the external drive and start again if necesary

Thanks

Cobian can be configured to REPLACE the files that have changed, so your backup rarely gets much bigger, give it a try, its free!

charlieheard

Happychappy wrote:

Hi

I have a 300gb external hard drive and Acronis true image. I originally backed up the C drive which is 70gb last October, out of the 70gb available, I have used around 52gb, I then backed it up again in Dec 06, this time using the incremental back up, and again today.

I find the external drive is now down from 300gb to only 90gb, I was expecting it would only keep backing up whatever had changed. Clearly it is making a fresh back up each time. I find the Acronis help files a bit difficult, am I doing this right or is there a more simplified way. I can delete the whole of the external drive and start again if necesary

Thanks

That's what an incremental backup does. If your PC crashes and you need to restore from your backup, you will need to install the original (Full) backup, and the two subsequent (Incremental) backups to get back to the state as of the last backup. This is a lot of work!

I use daily incremental backups, followed by a full backup at the weekend. This works for me as little changes on a daily basis, so the incremental backups are quick and small. I then backup the whole set to a cycle of 3 DVR-RW.

As you backup so infrequently, there is little point in using an incremental backup, so just go for the full backup each time. You could even cycle them if you want to keep earlier versions of things, so that you could keep the last 3 backups and just use the software package to delete the earlier ones...

Happychappy

Thanks for the replies

I just thought as my C drive was 70mgb with only 50 odd mgb used, it would stay around 50 mg, growing slightly by whatever else I had added, but not a full 70mgb each time. I was hoping to use space for other items like music nd photos etc. Looks like I will have to delete earlier backups

Thanks

DrSmutt

Happychappy wrote:

Thanks for the replies

I just thought as my C drive was 70mgb with only 50 odd mgb used, it would stay around 50 mg, growing slightly by whatever else I had added, but not a full 70mgb each time. I was hoping to use space for other items like music nd photos etc. Looks like I will have to delete earlier backups

Thanks

not sure what mgb is but i think you mean MB (Megabyte) if thats the case i would backup to CD.

charlieheard

Happychappy wrote:

Thanks for the replies

I just thought as my C drive was 70mgb with only 50 odd mgb used, it would stay around 50 mg, growing slightly by whatever else I had added, but not a full 70mgb each time. I was hoping to use space for other items like music nd photos etc. Looks like I will have to delete earlier backups

Thanks

WAIT before you delete earlier backups. If they are incremental backups, you will need the earlier ones to build off. Do a full backup first, then you can delete the older ones.

Just thinking about your sizing again, I am surprised that they are so large, too. If you are doing a full disk incremental backup, you should only get new files, and things that are volatile like the TEMP files and IE Cache would also change. These would be significant, but only of the order of a few Gb. Unless you are downloading loads of stuff and deleting it, or you are installing loads of apps and uninstalling, the incremental size should be small

My backup software (WinrescueXP) has a "Differential" backup, which backs up everything that has changed since the last full backup, so that I only need my last full backup and the latest differential backup to restore. I actually use this daily as it is quicker to restore, and the space difference for me is tiny.

Just check that your software is actually doing an incremental backup, and not a full or differential each time. Let us know what you find...

superscaper

DrSmutt wrote:

not sure what mgb is but i think you mean MB (Megabyte) if thats the case i would backup to CD.

I think he needs to make sure what numbers and units he's really talking about. mgb??? I'm still trying to get used to Mebibytes (MiB) and Gibibytes (GiB).

Happychappy

superscaper wrote:

I think he needs to make sure what numbers and units he's really talking about. mgb??? I'm still trying to get used to Mebibytes (MiB) and Gibibytes (GiB).

Hi Apologies, I meant Gigabytes, I have checked by another backup that the settings are for an incremental back up, but clearly it is doing a full back up, I really dont change a lot between each back up, just word and excel documents which are hardly a mb or so?

The problem I have at this rate is I will soon run out of backup space on a 300gib hard drive backing up a 70 gib internal hard drive. I think I might change this Acronis true image program to one of the others?

Aiadi

Thanks albert. my question is how can you run Acronis for example to restore your image from a DVD or external HD if the computer (operating system) is completely dead to start of with?

Lawbag_2

I voted Never, as I have a RAID 1 mirror in a standalone PC