Onboard back up drive too small

[cabinboy]

I have just gone through all the updating and configuring of my laptop after resetting to original install and now my total C drive is bigger than my E partion allocated for back ups.Is there a way to make the E partition a little bigger to allow my system image to fit or do I have to save it externally from now on, It would be nice to have a handy working and updated system backup available on my laptop if its at all possible, mainly for convenience more than anything else.I did try to shrink my C drive but that only created another partition which was not my intention and I had to extend C back to its original size, I see that my E drive does not have the extend option available.

 

[fireberd]

You should not be backing up to the same physical hard drive. If the drive were to fail everything is lost including your backups.
Only backup to some other external media. I do all my backups to a separate hard drive.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

You should not be backing up to the same physical hard drive. If the drive were to fail everything is lost including your backups.
Only backup to some other external media. I do all my backups to a separate hard drive.

Since even external backup drives can fail, it's a good idea to maintain two backup drives in separate locations. Your data should exist in three locations to be reasonably safe, such as on your computer, on an onsite backup drive, and on an offsite backup drive (the offsite and the onsite backup drives should be swapped out frequently to keep the offsite drive as up to date as possible.

The backup drives should be connected to the computer only when updating the backup. Otherwise, they should be kept disconnected from the computer.

 

[cabinboy]

On the subject of full system backups, does the backing up process need a lot more disk space than the actual finished back up, I have had two separate backups fail even though i thought there was plenty of room on the destination drive and it says not enough disk space to complete back up.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

On the subject of full system backups, does the backing up process need a lot more disk space than the actual finished back up, I have had two separate backups fail even though i thought there was plenty of room on the destination drive and it says not enough disk space to complete back up.

It depends on the type of backup you are making. More than one image will require more space than the original amount of space being backed up if keeping multiple backups made at different times (recommended, btw). That is one reason why imaging is so inefficient for backing up data. When backing up data with a folder/file syncing program (the OS and programs have to use imaging), the backup will only need the same space the original data occupied. If you want to back up earlier versions of files and/or deleted files, then you need to allow additional space for a versioning folder or use a separate HDD for versioning.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

On the subject of full system backups, does the backing up process need a lot more disk space than the actual finished back up, I have had two separate backups fail even though i thought there was plenty of room on the destination drive and it says not enough disk space to complete back up.

Are you using Windows Backup and Restore?

That application has its own peculiar ideas of what is to be included in a "full system backup".

And it's peculiar in other ways---not easily understood. As you can attest, if you are using it.

You'd also have more control if you had Windows and applications on one partition and data on another.

 

[cabinboy]

I am in fact using windows back up and restore, I checked the total used space of my C drive and the destination drive had about 10 GB more space. I want to do a full system back up as ive just got it all updated from scratch and it took some time, the save created three files / folders being MediaID.bin, Dell pc folder ( a disk like icon) and WindowImageBackup and im wondering if it builds a temp file on the destination drive and that is why its running out of drive space while creating the back up.The total C drive is about 28 GB