What, actually, is being backed up?

[Mr. Pedantic]

I use the Windows Backup tool to do a full system backup once every week, and I've been wondering what is being stored.

I have 3 drives:

One SSD, using 38.8GB.
WD Caviar 1, using 257GB.
WD Caviar 2, using 284GB.

So in total I'm using ~580GB. That's how much, give or take a few, should be backing up to my external hard drive. But that's not what Windows Backup says:

Space usage summary:

Data file backup: 837.88GB
System image: 55.67GB
Other Files: 27.53GB
Free Space: 941.93GB
Total Size: 1.82TB

Where is the other 260GB going? Is it backing up my first Caviar twice? If so, how can I make it stop?

Oh, and while we're at it, if you guys have any good recommendations for (preferably free) backup software, I'd like to hear it.

 

[oynaz]

Crashplan is very nice.

 

[Raffa]

Standard Windows Backup is optimized for home users. The typical size of the backup is 200 GB. But your Data file backup is 837.88GB.
When you have such large volumes of data, Windows Backup's performance may degrade.
You should use a system image. It's much more efficient in terms of performance.

Here's a link
http://social.technet.microsoft.com...p/thread/1ba794f6-0bac-443b-9e22-5b8f175c69ba

 

[Gooberlx2]

I'm gonna assume the SSD is your system drive and the others are data drives?

The system image is pretty self explanatory. The data drives get backed up incrementally, but Windows Backup sucks with its incremental capabilities (no deduplication makes for needlessly large backups, for example).

As suggested, use Crashplan.

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

Great, I'll give Crashplan a try