Acronis True Image

[MTbowels]

My computer is set to provide an image of my main C drive to my D drive using Acronis True Image. Both drives are 500GB in size. I'm using Windows 7 Ultimate

I've started having balloon messages over the last few days stating that my D drive is running out of space. On investigation, it's apparent that this is because of a number of Acronis "Systembackups" that have been saved to the drive. I've currently got only 10Mb of usable space left.

Now I know I should be able to delete some of the older backups. There are five files saved namely one dated June 2010 of 67Gb, One dated August 2011 of 41Gb, one dated 20 November 2011 of 147Gb, one dated 27 November 2011 of 29.1GB and one dated 4 December of 170Gb.

I'm confused about the dates and sizes of these images as I can't understand why they are of such differing sizes and why I've got two that were done in November.

Can anyone provide me with some advice please on which ones to delete? Why do they range between 29Gb and 170Gb? They all have the .tib extension.

Thank you.

[MTbowels]

Could you also tell me how to change the settings in Acronis to stop the D drive filling up like this.

Thanks

[VHG]

I have never used Acronis True Image to make regular images, but have used it to make backups now and again.

I assume you need to go into the Acronis User Interface and somehow get a list of the backups it has created and you can sort them by date and delete the oldest ones.

I have no idea why the backups are all such different sizes, unless it only backs up changed files, and sometimes more files are changed than others.

To be honest you are probably better off buying a large external hard drive,
1Tb (1000Mb) (or more) and backing up to that.

Backing up to the same hard disk that contains Windows is rather pointless as if that disk crashes the disk that has your backups on it will also crash.

Far better to have your backups to a separate hard drive.

[rojash]

My thoughts are pretty much the same as VHG's.
I would guess that you've configured it to do either differential or incremental backups.
I kind of assuming that your C and D drives are actual physical devices and not two partitions on the same physical drive - else, as VHG says, it's pretty pointless backing up because if one fails they both fail.
Even if they are two separate drive, it's not an ideal situation.

[AlBags]

You'll have to open the program and study the settings to find out.

The least you should do is save to a different partition (that's not an active one)
Use a USB caddy (open type) and an external bare SATA drive to drop into it.
Easy .. even easier if you were to use DriveImage XML .. but that's another story.

[MTbowels]

Yes, both C and D drives are different physical devices and not partitions on the same drive.

I've got no idea whether it's set to differential or incremental backups. I can't recall specifying either when I set it up. What's more worrying is that I can't find any way of establishing which it is by examining the settings. I've been through all the settings and drawn a blank.