Windows Backup Won't Increment

Hi everyone. Quick question: I've been using Windows Backup tool with Win 7 Pro for a few months, and it's been great so far.

For some reason, today, though, it stopped working as expected. I haven't made many changes to my system since my last backup, but for some reason Windows Backup is trying to make a NEW backup set, instead of adding an incremental update to the previous one. No matter what I do, it tries to make a whole new backup of 60+ GB, instead of adding the 1-2 GB additional to the existing backup.

Is there some way to specify that I want to increment, and not make a new copy?

I didn't turn it off, no. I've been launching the backup tool from the maintenance menu manually, and then running backups every so often of paths that I've specified. I'm positive it's backing up files in locations I specified. I don't have enough room to do a system image on the drive I have.

What may have caused it was that the drive I was using ran out of space, even for an incremental backup. I cleared off some old data on the drive to free up enough space for the incremental backup, but now it's trying to save a fresh new backup no matter what I do - Something I don't have the space for.

I'm going to assume re-incrementing to my previous backup sets is now impossible, even though I have the space for it. I'll just hope that nothing unfortunate happens until I get a newer, larger external drive.

richc46 said:

Carbonyl said:

I didn't turn it off, no. I've been launching the backup tool from the maintenance menu manually, and then running backups every so often of paths that I've specified. I'm positive it's backing up files in locations I specified. I don't have enough room to do a system image on the drive I have.

What may have caused it was that the drive I was using ran out of space, even for an incremental backup. I cleared off some old data on the drive to free up enough space for the incremental backup, but now it's trying to save a fresh new backup no matter what I do - Something I don't have the space for.

I'm going to assume re-incrementing to my previous backup sets is now impossible, even though I have the space for it. I'll just hope that nothing unfortunate happens until I get a newer, larger external drive.

We did not have this information, before. I am sure that is the cause. Allow me to make a suggestion. You cannot make a system image on a flash drive (official positon of MS) or on a CD (I or no one else was able to) but a free program Macrium Reflex can copy to CD. You may want to download Macrium Reflex and make a system image on CD, yes a bit of a pain in the XXX, but you will have a safety net in case of problems. We both know that problems will find us at the worst time. Just some thoughts.

I must be miscommunicating. I apologize for that.

I am not making a full system image. I have used Windows Backup's options to specify certain paths, and have been backing up only those paths. This has worked, incrementally, since August. Even if I didn't have enough space for another 40+ GB of full backups from those paths, incremental backups worked fine.

Tonight it finally hit the limit, so I cleared space on the drive. There's now 30 GB of overhead. That's more than enough for an incremental backup. But I can't get it to increment. It will only do a full backup.