I am running Vista and currently using Ghost 12 (but will soon upgrade to 15). I had Diskeeper 2007 on this computer, but set to manual defrag. I typically manually ran a defrag near the end of each day. I manually run Ghost each weekend, set up for quarterly full backups, with incrementals inbetween. The backup is to an external USB2 drive. My normal incremental backups are typically between 2-4G in size.
Last weekend, I updated to Diskeeper 2010 after the last backup. I turned on the Intelliwrite and I-FAAST options and left the automatic defrag on (needed for I-FAAST) and it has been running all week. Todays incremental took much longer than normal. When it finished, I checked and it was nearly 21G!
Is it something Diskeeper did that caused such a huge incremental? I'll find out next week if it keeps being so big. If so, I may turn off all the new features as I don't have that much free room, or time, for all those backups. I do like DK2010, as it does seem to have sped up some options, including bootup. The logon prompt now appears at about 55 seconds from power on, versus about 1:15-1:30 it did before.
The main reason for updating was in case I decide to update to Win7, as neither were compatible.
I am running Vista and currently using Ghost 12 (but will soon upgrade to 15). I had Diskeeper 2007 on this computer, but set to manual defrag. I typically manually ran a defrag near the end of each day. I manually run Ghost each weekend, set up for quarterly full backups, with incrementals inbetween. The backup is to an external USB2 drive. My normal incremental backups are typically between 2-4G in size.
Last weekend, I updated to Diskeeper 2010 after the last backup. I turned on the Intelliwrite and I-FAAST options and left the automatic defrag on (needed for I-FAAST) and it has been running all week. Todays incremental took much longer than normal. When it finished, I checked and it was nearly 21G!
Is it something Diskeeper did that caused such a huge incremental? I'll find out next week if it keeps being so big. If so, I may turn off all the new features as I don't have that much free room, or time, for all those backups. I do like DK2010, as it does seem to have sped up some options, including bootup. The logon prompt now appears at about 55 seconds from power on, versus about 1:15-1:30 it did before.
The main reason for updating was in case I decide to update to Win7, as neither were compatible.
The tricky bit is that Automatic and Manual defrag appear to use different strategies. Automatic has moved most everything to the end, but if I try to force a manual, it will just move everything back! Pretty poor design.
Last week's backup was 80G, and tihs week was 36G, despite most of the shift to the end being long done. On the other hand, there seem to be more and bigger Windows restore points or some other big files (tagged as green system files in Diskeeper.)
That does sound like an unfortunate design. Have you brought it up with Disk Keeper? It sounds like your Disk Keeper settings lead to very frequent defragmentation. If you have a big destination location you may want to weekly base (right after your disk keeper defrag) with incrementals a little more frequently or only do base images. Just depends on what you have at hand and what level of recovery you want.
I updated to Ghost 15, and it doesn't really "see" the older backups (I have a thread on that.) I assume when I make my next backup, it will create a new base, hopefully with most of the defrag issues settled down.
I am sort-of assuming it would move everything back to the front. I did start a manual to see what would happen, but even after letting it run awhile, I didn't see any obvious movement on the screen where it shows the file layout. I'll see how things works out. If I can't keep the incrementals down to a reasonable size, I may go back to manual only defrag.
I stopped using Diskeeper a few years ago because it made Ghost produce large incrementals. PerfectDisk doesn't do this.
I had Diskeeper set for manual defragging. I kept a screenshot of the Diskeeper graphic, daily. Every few days my incremental size would jump up and the screenshot would show that a chunk of data, around 1 to 2 GB had moved. No defragging had taken place as there wasn't a reduction in fragmented files. It was just data movement. Uninstalling Diskeeper fixed the incremental problem.
I've never tried Diskeeper but I've had PerfectDisk for quite some number of years and never had a problem with it. It also has a very efficient online and offline defragger.
I used the Windows Cleanup utility to remove all but the latest system restore. That freed up a whopping 60G of space. Hopefully, with everything updated, and the defrag movement done, this will prevent it from getting so big so fast.
Diskeeper has an option for volumes with Volume Shadow Copy that is supposed to reduce the amount or size of backups Windows creates, but enabling that disables the I-FAAST option.