Originally posted by: btcomm1
Ok, so I did a full backup then I set it to do an incremental backup 1 minute later. The file that it created was 13 MB. Then I set it to do another incremental backup an hour later and it created a 50 MB file. I have made virtually no changes to the computer in that hour and it has 63 MB worth of data from incremental backups, what is up with that?
Well, frequently your OS is touching various things on disk (updating logs, running indexing services, etc.) even if you're "not doing anything". If you are causing swapfile accesses, those blocks will be marked as changed. And anything you run/access will result in changed blocks from the filesystem timestamps being updated. Try shutting down anything running in the background, leave the system totally idle, and see if it's still generating much.
If I have an external drive will it fill up the whole thing even though the total MB on this HD is 20 GB?
Well, if you keep doing incremental backups forever without deleting any, yes, it will eventually fill up the drive (unless nothing is changing on the disk).
How fast it will fill it up depends on how many MBs of data gets changed each time you do an incremental backup, and how many of them you make. If you want daily snapshots and you modify, say, 100MB of data per day on average, each incremental backup will need ~100MB of space.
Normally you'd do something like a full backup once per week/month, and then an incremental off of that every week/day (or hour, or whatever makes sense).
A full backup every day seems a little excessive to me for most home users -- it also reduces the likelyhood that you'll have a good copy to fail back to if a file gets corrupted or you mistakenly delete it, etc. (unless you plan on keeping many full backups around). The only drawback to incremental backups is that a screwup during any of the incremental backups (or loss of any of the incremental files if they are stored separately from the original image) may make that whole full/incremental set unusable -- at the very least, you won't be able to restore to any later snapshot. Restores also usually take longer -- sometimes much longer, if you go a long time between full backups and make many incremental images.
Also I tried setting the computer up for a full backup daily named the same thing as I used to do the first full backup and when that time comes it isn't doing the backup, how is a daily full backup supposed to work?
You might need to set it to overwrite files? I think by default Acronis won't overwrite old images. But it's been a while since I've set anything up like that.
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