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7.5.370 with Vista - Backup size ballooning


StephenOrd

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Hi,

 

Anyone else seen a problem where Retrospect wants to back up the System Volume Information folder? In Vista Ultimate this seems to hold the Shadow Copies (as well as System Restore info) so over the last few weeks my backups have gone from 61GB (which is about right) to almost 100GB because retrospect wants to backup this folder. Am I safe just excluding this folder? Should Retrospect not recognise this as system data and not back it up? If I do a disk cleanup and select to clean the System Restore and Shadow Copies option my data and backup goes back to 61GB.

 

Thanks,

 

Stephen

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I found a similar problem and decided it was because the Retrospect 'Selectors' do not work in Vista as they did in XP. I suppose they were written for XP and may have to be re-written for Vista. I am now doing a very selective, item by item, backup. It is the only way that I can get what I want without a lot of rubbish.

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That is my experience too. Selectors simply are not working in Vista (at least not for me). I am running 7.5.370, and have re-created my usual Selectors several times and each time, Vista ignores the Selectors I've chosen and decides to back up [nearly] the entire drive.

 

Not cool.

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A tangent.

 

Is there a reference on how to use selectors? I 'get it' on how to use the Exclude ones [and I know the difference between OR and AND]. But, how to use the Include selectors?

 

The problem I'm having is my assumption is that the default is to include everything in a folder. So, what good does it to identify specific folders/files to include?

 

Any help appreciated.

 

Thanks

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  • 2 weeks later...

Every time I run a backup of my Vista Home Premium box, I add about 16GB although there's been no real activity on the system. When I watch the backup in progress, the filenames are very long strings of hex digits of the form {aaaa-bbbb-cccc-dddd-eeee-ffff.....}. I don't know if these are the files referred to earlier in this thread or something else.

 

Can I omit these files and still have a valid backup set? If so, how?

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  • 3 weeks later...

I have seen the same problem in Vista(Backup size ballooning).

 

However, I found a partial cure. With the backup "Data Compression" enabled, the VISTA restore files ({aaaa-bbbb-cccc-dddd-eeee-ffff.....}) get compressed by almost 90% (or 10% of original size).

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Leo-

Thanks for the suggestion. A couple of questions:

 

Does turning on compression add significant time to the backup process?

 

You referred to these files as the "VISTA restore files". Do you know what these files do, and whether they can be omitted from the backups?

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These big files are in the hidden directory "System Volume Information". My understanding is that they are part of the System Restore. I do not know if omitting these files from the backup will have an impact on the ability to do a full restore from the backup set. Because of that, I am backing up these files.

 

My PC is a core duo 6600. Enabling the compression does not seems to have a significant impact on the performance. For some files it is faster, on other files it is slower. On the big files from system restore, it seems that enabling the compression make it is faster. For files that do not compress much (like ZIP, MPEG or JPEG files), it will be slower.

 

It would like to have in Retrospect the ability of Enabling/Disabling the compression based of the file type. With this option you could disable the compression for file that do not compress.

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>>It would like to have in Retrospect the ability of Enabling/Disabling the compression based of the file type. With this option you could disable the compression for file that do not compress.

 

Go to Configure

Hold down the Shift key and select "Selectors"

 

This will give you access to the Compression Filter where you can make changes. You should absolutely make a copy of the selector prior to editing.

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I used more than once the RESTORE function. It make it easy to roll back a bad driver install or software install. The process take only few minutes. A full system restore is more scary and will take a couple of hours. In vista, there is no rescue disk. You have to re-install the OS, then Retrospect (the correct version for vista). After this then I have to restore two HD (320G each) in my machine.

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Is it safe? Will the restored PC be functionning properly. Will the registry be in SYNC with the state of the PC?

 

BTW, this show that if the compression is enabled, saving the restore point is not too bad:

4/14/2007 9:48:59 AM: Execution completed successfully

Completed: 5113 files, 14.6 GB, with 96% compression

Performance: 1968.1 MB/minute

Duration: 00:11:14 (00:03:40 idle/loading/preparing)

 

The size of this backup is only 4% of 14.1 G (or 564 M).

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