Weird Result after Imaging

I am foxed by this strange event. Yesterday I uninstalled IE9 and WMP from my C drive including their related applications. After that I made a new image of the Drive with Acronis 2011.

Everything went smoothly with nary a hitch. However later when I checked the image size I noticed that the earlier image with IE9, WMP and components was 8.09 gigabytes but the new image sans them was 8.15 gigabytes.

The later image should have been smaller in size and about 8.00 gigabytes. I wonder why it is 60 megabytes bigger. What could have caused this to happen?

Amarnath Wanchoo

I don't use Acronis so this is just a guess. Does Acronis make any additional restore points prior to imaging? Whenever I've used the Windows 7 imaging tool a new restore point is created.

Hello Lee,

I always keep my System Restore turned off. I never use it because I always restore from Images.

Best and regards,

Amarnath Wanchoo

Your problem is weird so I did some more searching. I found a reference to a MaximumPC magazine article about XP:

An incremental backup can indeed be larger than the installation it’s copied from, if you’ve recently defragged the primary drive. The solution is to create a new full backup of the drive after your defragmentation. This can also happen if you use Outlook and you’ve picked the Fast Incremental backup method; your .pst file changes constantly, and will increase the size of your image.

Source: Maximum PC | Backup Larger than Original

And that got me looking for any Acronis info. I found this:

Acronis Backup Software Creates Large Incremental or Differential Backup Archives | Knowledge Base

Any chance one of these circumstances might apply to you?

I don't think it applies because both are full images. I have sent a message to the Acronis people. Let us see if they come back.