Backup Filled My Backup Drive!

[Keith Russell]

Hello, everyone.

I am quite bewildered by the results of my latest backup and hope
that someone can enlighten me.

As my laptop was in the process of dying, I needed to get a
complete current backup while I could, so I bought a new 500GB
external drive to back up my 250 GB drive. My data was on drive
e:; the system, of course, was on drive c:; and I backed up both
logical drives.

When I was done, I found that my backup drive was almost full! I
would now like to back up my reconfigured system, but have no
space to do so. No problem with the e: backup; its size is 32GB.
The c: backup, however, is 428 GB. The interesting thing is that
when I add the sizes of all folders and root files on that drive,
I get under 110 GB. (Note that I have Explorer configured to
display all files.)

I am running Vista Ultimate x64 with NTFS partitions.

Can you tell me what's going on and what I can do to recover the
lost space without removing my backup?

Thanks.

 

[DL]

If you want to backup a system drive IMO Imaging is a better option
eg True Image

 

[Keith Russell]

If you want to backup a system drive IMO Imaging is a better option
eg True Image

I agree, and in fact I own a copy of True Image. Unfortunately,
the state of my system at the time was such that I was unable to
run True Image. Once I recover enough backup space to do so, my
next step is actually to create a True Image backup....

 

[Keith Russell]

When I was done, I found that my backup drive was almost full! I
would now like to back up my reconfigured system, but have no
space to do so. No problem with the e: backup; its size is 32GB.
The c: backup, however, is 428 GB. The interesting thing is that
when I add the sizes of all folders and root files on that drive,
I get under 110 GB. (Note that I have Explorer configured to
display all files.)

I am running Vista Ultimate x64 with NTFS partitions.

Can you tell me what's going on and what I can do to recover the
lost space without removing my backup?

No ideas? Am I stuck with deleting a huge chunk of my backup to
make room for the next one? :-(

Keith

 

[jonathan perreault]

:O, OMG, i know a keith russel from where my dad works, at airline
reproduction corporation, wow lol what a coincidence, have you looked at the
help and support from microsoft? i seem to recall some patch/update(if you
can call microsoft updates's, updates lol) about vista reporting the wrong
size, altho this wouldn't help you if the drive is actually full. could you
give us the specs? like for example the capacity of the drive, and also the
free space, and which drive is what. i didn't really understand which drive
was the back up drive and which one was the drive being backed up. altho, i
would think C drive would be the drive being backed up, but i need to
confirm that you indeed set it up that way(i seen a windows OS running from
D drive, and recognising it has such :/ ) and the specs would help a bit.

 

[Keith Russell]

Jon, thanks for the reply. Sorry I wasn't clearer, but I found
the problem and have it mostly resolved! Thanks for the
suggestion that Vista might be reporting the wrong folder sizes
on the backup/target drive; this did help to lead me to the
solution. The folder Properties size was not reliable, and worse
yet, the tooltip sizes did not at all match what I was seeing in
Properties. Once I realized this, checking the sizes very
carefully and repeatedly, I was able to track down what was
happening.

Doing some research on how Vista stores user settings was the
key. Here's what I found when I looked more closely:

The backup application had backed up C:\Documents and Settings,
which I expected. (Yes, my OS was on drive C:.) The size of this
folder on the backup drive was 337 GB! This despite the fact that
my source drive (even if it had been full, which it wasn't) holds
quite a bit less than the rated 250 GB. This was the biggest
contributor to the fact that my 500 GB backup drive had only 3 GB
free after a single backup of my 250-GB source drive.

Even more interesting was what I found when I looked into where
the 337 GB came from. I traced down the path C:\Documents and
Settings\Keith\AppData\Local\Application Data, where I found that
the size of Application Data was 161 GB. Inside Application Data,
in addition to the expected application folders, was another
Application Data folder! In fact, Application Data was repeatedly
nested 5 levels deep, with sizes of 161, 142, 122, 103, and 83
GB. Each Application Data folder contained, in addition to
another Application Data folder, all the same application
folders. It truly was turtles all the way down.

So what I had was:

C:\Documents and Settings\Keith\AppData\Local\Application
Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application
Data\Application Data.

Furthermore, it was interesting to discover that on the source
drive, none of these folders are real folders! In Vista, they are
"junction" shortcuts pointing to folders under C:\Users. So what
I had was essentially large amounts of data under \Users being
duplicated multiple times!

How did this happen? All I can do is speculate, and I might be
completely wrong with my limited understanding of how Vista
works, but... It seems that the backup application could not tell
the difference between the junction folders under Documents and
Settings and the real folders under Users, and thus copied the
files into both locations. Also, because of nested "shortcuts" or
junctions, it apparently saw the same folder structure over and
over, and continued to copy folders until it ran out of space.

So I deleted the top-level Application Data folder under
Documents and Settings on my backup drive, but still have the
rest of the files in that folder. So here are my questions for
anyone who understands this better than I do:

1. Is there any reason that I shouldn't delete the entire
Documents and Settings folder on the target drive? Is absolutely
everything going to be duplicated in the Users folder?

2. In doing a file backup (as opposed to an image backup), would
there ever be any reason to back up the Documents and Settings
folder and its contents?

Thanks!