Acronis True Image

[Jokerswild]

How much disc space is needed for the back-ups using this software? I went to their site but I didn't see anything that would give me a idea on how big a partition I would need for the back-up of say 100 gigs. Do you need to have 100 gigs of space to back-up the entire 100 gigs used on your HDD or what degree is the compression?

[onebxr]

I think you have the option of what compression you want to use. I dont compress so its a 1:1 thing.
-1

[Computer-Ed]

Compression is hard to perdict in a large backup do to the nature of the files being used. For example many files today already have some form of compression working in them, thus further compression is limited if not none existent.

I can tell you that I have used Acronis for a long time and it is an outstanding backup program.

[Quakindude]

When I used the default settings, it was about 8 gigs of backup data per 70 gigs of actual disk space for an OS drive.

A drive that had over 100Gb of mp3's and another 230Bg of games, movies, family pictures and so on had a 220Gb data backup file for a 330Gb drive.

So the backup file size will be in direct proportion to how high a compression level you use and the number/type of files you have. Acronis goes from none - normal - high - maximum. When I do data backups, i use the High setting. There's very little advantage to using the maximum over the high setting.

I made a user review about it here. Acronis TrueImage 10 is out now, so I'm not sure if they've whittled the backup files down more or not.

[stinger608]

Originally Posted by Jokerswild

How much disc space is needed for the back-ups using this software? I went to their site but I didn't see anything that would give me a idea on how big a partition I would need for the back-up of say 100 gigs. Do you need to have 100 gigs of space to back-up the entire 100 gigs used on your HDD or what degree is the compression?

On a drive that I had a little over 46gb of data on it, compressed down to 26gb. As stated though, it depends on how much data on your drive is already compressed. But I would look at somewhere in the area of 70 to 85 gigs needed to back up 100 gigs of data.

And there is a setting in Acronis that you can set the level of compression.

[yurimxpxman]

You must also keep in mind that it can't do much good for files that are already compressed, like MP3 and FLAC files.

[Jokerswild]

Thanks guy's !!!! My cousin owns a flower shop in Omaha and she asked what to use for back-up so I pointed Her to Acronis, I just wanted to give her a idea on how much of the drive to use for the Acronis partition. I also recommended using a second HDD or a usb HDD to back-up just for added protection.

[Quakindude]

Originally Posted by Jokerswild

Thanks guy's !!!! My cousin owns a flower shop in Omaha and she asked what to use for back-up so I pointed Her to Acronis, I just wanted to give her a idea on how much of the drive to use for the Acronis partition. I also recommended using a second HDD or a usb HDD to back-up just for added protection.

She can also do daily or weekly incremental backups to an external drive. That way, she isn't writing a whole new image every time she backs up. Your on the right path with backing up to an external device or secondary drive. Not much help if you back up to the same drive and then have that drive die on you.