baytonemus Posted February 19, 2006 Report Share Posted February 19, 2006 I was just doing a bit of looking around on my drives/volumes (way too many) when I noticed that the volume to which I do my backups is almost full. I did a little comparing and found that the size of each backup file is about 2.5 times the original contents. Is this normal and I just haven't noticed it before? Why are these files so huge? Thanks - JAY Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CallMeDave Posted February 19, 2006 Report Share Posted February 19, 2006 Quote: Why are these files so huge? Because each time you perform a backup to a File Backup Set, Retrosepct adds the files that have changed, leaving the older information intact. It's normal, expected and desired behavior. Dave Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
baytonemus Posted February 19, 2006 Author Report Share Posted February 19, 2006 Thanks, Dave. If I'm satisfied that I only need to backup what's on the disk now, should I create a new backup file or can I change the setting for the existing one? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
waltr Posted February 21, 2006 Report Share Posted February 21, 2006 hi bay, change the settings of your current script to do a 'recycle' backup instead of the incremental. that should free up a lot of space in this case. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RonaldL Posted February 21, 2006 Report Share Posted February 21, 2006 Keep in mind that a recycle backup will rebackup all files again, even if they haven't changed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dmeek Posted March 8, 2006 Report Share Posted March 8, 2006 I have the same problem with a first time backup. Using Retrospect Express 6.1 on Mac OSX 10.4.5, I tried to execute a backup for the first time on a new 500GB Maxtor drive (423GB free after creating a separate 40GB boot partition). The source files totaled 367GB and contained a total of approximately 200,000 files. It ran out of space after several hours. So after re-formatting the partition to free up the maximum space, I tried a backup of just one user account containing 172GB and about 36,000 files. The resulting backup file was 210GB, which is over 20% larger than the source. This just doesn't seem right to me. Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CallMeDave Posted March 11, 2006 Report Share Posted March 11, 2006 Quote: The resulting backup file was 210GB, which is over 20% larger than the source. Retrospect does more then just copy files blindly into one large file. The cataloging of the files takes overhead, which is where the extra space is used. When you do subsequent Backups, the Backup Set (likely split into two files) will continue to grow as changed files are added to the Backup Set, plus whatever additional overhead is necessary. But this is all good, because you will have running versions available to Restore if you need to. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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