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Complete Pc Backup

#1 User is offline   Oskie 

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Posted 19 April 2008 - 06:38 AM

Hi there
Not sure if I have a problem or I'm just over thinking things. I have a new pc with 2 x 250GB hard drives. I installed Vista Ultimate on it and decided to play with some of the features. I kicked off a Complete PC Backup to my D: drive to see how easy it would be and was pleased enough that it seemed painless. I then deleted the backup as I hadn't finished copying my data etc over from my old pc. Once I'd copied everything, I kicked off the Complete PC backup again, but thats when I hit a problem. It appears to think that I kept the old backup and is now only backing up the differences. How do I get it to do a complete image of my pc? I only have about 35GB used so in a worst case scenario, I can do a full reinstall and then do a Complete backup, but that just seems like so much work.

Also, in the Backup Files option, is there any way I can specify what directories I want it to backup? It only seems to give me options like Pictures, Documents etc. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

#2 User is offline   pip22 

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Posted 19 April 2008 - 10:41 AM

Even though you deleted the backup, The Backup tool may be getting it's previous backup information from a 'catalog' folder on the same partition where the backup file was (drive D). I imagine you need to delete the contents of this 'catalog' folder to make the backup tool create another full backup instead of an incremental one, since it will no longer have the contents of the 'catalog' folder to tell it which files haven't changed.

#3 User is offline   Oskie 

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Posted 19 April 2008 - 02:07 PM

Thanks for the quick reply.

I tried formatting the D: to remove absolutely everything and re-ran the backup - still coming in at 11GB but when I look at my C: drive it's telling me that approximately 35GB of space has been used. Then spent a while trying to find a command line prompt to do a backup to see if that would give me a different answer. I ran "WBADMIN START BACKUP -backupTarget:d: -include:c:" but that also gave me a backup of approx 11GB in size.

Then I realised I was a complete idiot and tried highlighting the actual directories and doing a Properties and that told me the space being used was 12 GB. Then I realised I was including the pagefile.sys in my space calcs and probably a bunch of other stuff - volume shadowing? - that would never be backed up. Doh!!! Looks like on this occasion Vista was working and it was just the user that wasn't! :huh:

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