Backup error: 0x80780048 - 'Backup not successful' even though it was!

Hi, I have spent the last 6 hours or so backing up about 480GB of data onto a 1TB external hard drive, only for it to tell me that: "The backup was not successful. The error is: There is not enough free space on the backup storage location to back up the data. (0x80780048)."

What is most peculiar is that all the folders and files I selected have been backed up and are restorable from the backup.

My hunch is that after the backup completed backing up my selected folders it failed because the 'include a system image' checkbox was ticked (by default) and there obviously wasnt enough space left for an entire system image (800GB+).

I just unchecked this and ran the backup again (it just added a few new files I had saved while the original was running) and it has worked fine and the event log now says 'backup completed successfully'.

Can I just check that my hunch is indeed correct here, I want to be extra sure that the error was just because there wasnt enough space for the system image and it hasnt borked anything else up.

Thanks for any help!

Nozy

mjf said:

I think your hunch sounds right. I assume your 450GB backup was the Windows file/folder backup and not a system image. I'd use Windows file/folder backup for modest amounts of data but not 450GB as I find it a bit slow to begin with. If you have this data on your OS partition then you may want to move most of it to a separate partition and keep your OS partition at ~50GB occupancy. This allows you to do more regular system imaging in a reasonable time. For system imaging I would also recommend (free or paid) Macrium Reflect.

Well it does indeed seem like it was just the system image that caused the 'backup failure' message, since the rest of the data is fine, and after running it again with system image turned off it worked fine with no error messages.

I realise windows backup is slow in these situations after doing a bit more research, but ive always been used to everything being in once place, the idea of different partitions kinda freaks me out a bit. Im not familiar what is stored where in such a system, things like the pictures and videos libraries and such, are they placed with the other windows components, would i have to move them manually to a different location and such things.

I presume when you say a system image is better for large data sizes you mean that it would be for creating a system image of the storage partition instead of the windows partition?

Sorry I must have misread what you meant. When you said 'This allows you to do more regular system imaging in a reasonable time' I thought you were referring to system imaging the data partition, as I had read elsewhere that system imaging was quicker for large amounts of data than windows backup.