AlienRespawn won't install full system backups!

Basically every time I try to respawn a full system backup it says there is not enough disk space. I perform the backups on a 500GB external drive, half of which is empty. My 1TB hard drive is partitioned in two, with plenty of space left. Any ideas?

Also, who should I contact support wise about AlienRespawn?

Thanks.

EDIT: Using a partition wizard I noticed the RECOVERY partition was about 60% full and I remember it being lower... could it be increasing to the point where AlienRespawn can't function when in boot, prompting it to say there is not enough disc space?

 

sounds to me like its the second partition that is screwing you up...can you restore into a unpartitioned empty drive?

 

You mean delete my second partition and try to restore to the unpartitioned drive? Seems like AlienRespawn can't handle partitions. Until a week ago, when testing my system backups it gave a warning that the second partition could not be restored before proceeding with installing the image... Now all of the sudden it just says there is not enough disk space.

 

i dont know how the alien respawn tool works but there are 2 different types of imaging tools. Those that use file by file, and thoses that do sector by sector. If the respawn tool is the latter, it will only be able to restore into the same size (or sometimes larger) partitions. Did you use a aftermarket tool to resize your partitions? If so, this is your issue. Blow it all away and use disks/usb to restore.

 

Well, that makes sense, except for the fact that the issues only just started a week ago, before that the backups worked just fine. Nothing has changed in the mean time, I had the partitions done every since I received the laptop...

 

ohhhh, it sounds like you bought the extra piece of the alien respawn tool. To be honest, why? i wipped my laptop, created a "base" clean install and created an image of that. My data, i backup to an external USB drive every once and a while.....i would prefer to restore a clean image to get that zippy-just-been-installed-feel. The full backups will restore all of the crap that causes your system to slow down over time IMO.

 

Just received an alert from AlienRespawn that I'm over the space limit set for my backup destination, which is my external hard drive. I see in options that you can set up to 30% of disc space reserved for system recovery... My current full system backup is at 35%, so I'm assuming it could cause the disc space error. I'll try moving the system backup to another (larger) drive and see what happens.

 

So, turns out the primary (OS) partition had to be enlarged. AlienRespawn doesn't handle separate partitions, but it will perform the backups normally and save the registry information so that anything installed on separate partitions will work just fine. Reverting to an image that was backed up prior to making a new partition will NOT delete/remove said partition or anything installed in it. However, none of those programs will work since there are no registry entries associated with them.

Sorry if this seems trivial, most of you probably know this by now, just thought I'd mention it.