Doing whole backups instead of incremental

[bru]

Using Backup and Restore in Win7 with a schedule of every Sunday. For the first several weeks everything was working fine. The first backup took a long time but the subsequent ones were short as it just added the new files. It looked something like 5/1/2011 to 5/29/2011.

Now for the last two weeks it has done complete backups, taking a huge anmount of time to complete. After last week I had two backups, 5/1/2011 to 5/29/2011 and 6/5/2011. So I deleted the first one to save space. This week it is doing it again. So I imagine I will have 6/5/2011 and 6/12/2011.

What went wrong? I didn't change any settings.

 

[mjf]

I don't know the algorithm MS use to decide when to do a full file/folder (zip style) backup. I suspect it does it after a period of time has elapsed or a "significant" change has been made. It definitely will do a new file/folder backup after a reimage.

I recommend:
- do images manually via the "Create a System Image" button
- don't "let Windows manage" backups. Instead choose "let me decide" and untick the automatically perform image option. You can still have backups scheduled.
- Try to manage you data structure so that your file/folder backups aren't too large in size. If you have a lot of static data in say Music, Pictures and Video then move it out of the regular backup schedule. Windows file/folder backup is slow.