hard drive size for back ups

Hi guys, I've been trying to search for an answer but am unable to find, I was thinking of using Acronis to backup my boot drive, my question is, if I have a 1TB as a main drive, and I want to use a secondary drive to backup that 1TB using full backup then incremental backup, must I get a 1TB drive or can I get bigger? Does incremental keep increasing until hard drive is full or it'll only backup until the size of the main drive?

Thanks in advance!

 

What do you mean a full backup? If you want to mirror the drive, then yes, you need a 1TB drive. If you just mean a full Windows+apps+data backup, well, that depends on the size of the data.

Incremental means that you do one full backup, and then each incremental backup after that only logs the changed data. What's recommended with incrementals is that every week or two you do a new full backup, so that you don't have to apply a ton of incremental changes if you have to restore something.

 

Not really mirror, Acronis does a full back up, sort of like an image I guess? I backed up temporarily on my 1TB drive which I used to store only photos, and that full backup size was approx 270GB, I'm planning on getting a hard drive to act solely as backup. Hmmm.... I guess its something like time machine where you do an initial backup then incremental

 

So, you need to size the backup drive according to the size of the data you have, plus some. A 1TB backup drive will back up a half-filled 1TB source drive reasonably, but it won't be good for an 80% filled drive. It really depends entirely on the source data, and further then how often and how much is changes. Incremental backups only document the changes, so if you're not writing a bunch of new files or editing a ton of large, existing files the incremental backups won't be very large at all.

 

So to back up a 1tb hard drive, its better to get a 2TB rather than a 1TB to backup?

 

Acronis creates a bit-for-bit image of your PC so the relative size of your backup source is irrelevant as long as you have enough sufficent storage space. Your OS drive could be a 2TB drive, but if you're OS only contained 60GB worth of data you could backup your OS to an 80GB HDD. The restore process is what really matters. The partition tables must match that of the drive you restore from. So if you backup a 500GB hard drive your replacement drive must be 500GB or higher.

 

So basically, 1TB main drive can be backed up by another 1TB hard drive as long as I don't create multiple full backups? 1TB backup can be done like 1 full backup and then multiple incremental until hard drive is full?

 

Would it be better that you use ONE drive for cloning the current drive and another one for incremental backups? The idea of mixing a full backup and incremental backups on one drive does not appeal to me personally

cheers ...

 

It would mean having to buy multiple hard drives and my computer doesn't have any more PCIe or SATA ports or USB ports to support 2 more drives

 

Again, we're mixing backups and acronis

Acronis completes a full, disc image backup. What it calls incremental back ups are not the same as traditional back ups as outlines by Pitabred.

Acronis makes a COMPLETE IMAGE, when it runs an incremental UPDATE to that image, it simply alters those bits that have changed since the last time it ran.

It will still be only one single image. The incremental aspect of it is simply so it does not take two hours to create the image, but a couple of minutes since only a few files have changed.

So, to recap:

With Acronis making and image with incremental UPDATEs from 1 tb drive, a 1 tb backup drive is sufficient.

edit:: indeed, it is even more than sufficient since Acronis if set up properly does not image the blank space and can even be compressed. So a 1tb drive with 500gb used, when imaged with acronis could easily be a 300gb image that changes at every incremental update by a couple megabytes, but does not necessarily ADD megabytes

 

Ahh.... Understood, thanks a lot!