Radified Community Forums - Size Difference (NG12)

thomas

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Size Difference (NG12)
Feb 29^th, 2008 at 12:54pm

Hi all, first post so please be kind!

I've just done my first drive-based backup and started a new recovery point on an external USB drive.

Now, everything went smoothly however I'm a bit perplexed as regards file sizes. My C drive is roughly 78 GB but the saved recovery point is only 54 GB.

Why do they differ in size if it's taking a bit-by-bit snapshot of my C drive? I'm not using compression so I'm a bit puzzled.

Anyone got the answer?

Thanks in advance. Embarrassed

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Brian

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	Re: Size Difference (NG12) Reply #1 - Feb 29^th, 2008 at 2:11pm thomas, Your page-file and hibernation file aren't included in the image so that would make a few GB difference. Is the total C: drive 78 GB or is the used space equal to 78 GB. Only used space is backed up if you use SmartSector Copying. It's on by default. Out of interest, I always use compression.
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	Re: Size Difference (NG12) Reply #2 - Feb 29^th, 2008 at 5:11pm If you're making images that are 50-gigs, then you might be interested in partitioning strategies. That's at least twice as big as they need to be. http://partition.radified.com/
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thomas

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Re: Size Difference (NG12)
Reply #3 - Feb 29^th, 2008 at 6:36pm

Brian wrote on Feb 29^th, 2008 at 2:11pm:

thomas,

Your page-file and hibernation file aren't included in the image so that would make a few GB difference.

Is the total C: drive 78 GB or is the used space equal to 78 GB. Only used space is backed up if you use SmartSector Copying. It's on by default.

Out of interest, I always use compression.

Thanks for the reply, much appreciated.

I'm running a 2x150 GB RAID 0 configuration, split into 2x150 GB partitions. I suppose I like to live dangerously!? Undecided

Anyway, to answer your question, the C drive is 150 GB and Vista is reporting that the used space is 78 GB. However DiskPie is reporting that 63.5 GB is used. So that leaves 10 Gb to account for if we believe DiskPie rather than Vista.

Could the hibernation & page files be as much as 10 GB?

Cheers, Thomas.

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Brian

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	Re: Size Difference (NG12) Reply #4 - Feb 29^th, 2008 at 8:06pm Quote: Could the hibernation & page files be as much as 10 GB? I doubt it but I think they equal 2.5 times your RAM (in WinXP).
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John.

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Re: Size Difference (NG12)
Reply #5 - Feb 29^th, 2008 at 9:17pm

thomas wrote on Feb 29^th, 2008 at 6:36pm:

Anyway, to answer your question, the C drive is 150 GB and Vista is reporting that the used space is 78 GB. However DiskPie is reporting that 63.5 GB is used. So that leaves 10 Gb to account for if we believe DiskPie rather than Vista.
Could the hibernation & page files be as much as 10 GB?

From a Vista elevated command prompt enter the following to see how much is being used by Vista for system restore files. Deduct them and see if the numbers add up.

vssadmin list shadowstorage

How much is allocated and how much used?

See this thread for more info:
http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1203113321/0#7

Ghost4me Ghost 9, 10, 12, 14, 15. Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7

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thomas

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Re: Size Difference (NG12)
Reply #6 - Mar 1^st, 2008 at 8:13am

John. wrote on Feb 29^th, 2008 at 9:17pm:

thomas wrote on Feb 29^th, 2008 at 6:36pm:

Anyway, to answer your question, the C drive is 150 GB and Vista is reporting that the used space is 78 GB. However DiskPie is reporting that 63.5 GB is used. So that leaves 10 Gb to account for if we believe DiskPie rather than Vista.
Could the hibernation & page files be as much as 10 GB?

From a Vista elevated command prompt enter the following to see how much is being used by Vista for system restore files. Deduct them and see if the numbers add up.

vssadmin list shadowstorage

How much is allocated and how much used?

See this thread for more info:
http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1203113321/0#7

Bloody hell! Shocked

I'm absolutely astonished by that; I had no idea whatsoever that the shadow volume was eating up so much of my HDD.

Thanks for that - it all adds up perfectly.

Now to see what I can do to reduce the shadow volume, or is that not advisable.

Edit: actually now that I've read further on in your suggested thread it states that Ghost does copy the shadow volume, so that wouldn't account for the discrepancy - or have I got the wrong end of the stick again?

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John.

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Re: Size Difference (NG12)
Reply #7 - Mar 1^st, 2008 at 8:25am

thomas wrote on Mar 1^st, 2008 at 8:13am:

Bloody hell! Shocked

I'm absolutely astonished by that; I had no idea whatsoever that the shadow volume was eating up so much of my HDD.
Thanks for that - it all adds up perfectly.
Now to see what I can do to reduce the shadow volume, or is that not advisable.

Edit: actually now that I've read further on in your suggested thread it states that Ghost does copy the shadow volume, so that wouldn't account for the discrepancy - or have I got the wrong end of the stick again?

How much is allocated and how much used?

I

don't agree

(until proven otherwise) with the assertion that Ghost copies the shadow volume data in Vista.

Do a search on Google for vssadmin and you'll find several articles on how to modify the system restore size. Here's one:

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/06/26/how-to-change-and-limit-system-restore-...

After you reduce it, take another Ghost backup. My bet is that your Ghost file backup size won't have changed.

Ghost4me Ghost 9, 10, 12, 14, 15. Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7

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thomas

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Re: Size Difference (NG12)
Reply #8 - Mar 1^st, 2008 at 8:47am

John. wrote on Mar 1^st, 2008 at 8:25am:

thomas wrote on Mar 1^st, 2008 at 8:13am:

Bloody hell! Shocked

I'm absolutely astonished by that; I had no idea whatsoever that the shadow volume was eating up so much of my HDD.
Thanks for that - it all adds up perfectly.
Now to see what I can do to reduce the shadow volume, or is that not advisable.

Edit: actually now that I've read further on in your suggested thread it states that Ghost does copy the shadow volume, so that wouldn't account for the discrepancy - or have I got the wrong end of the stick again?

How much is allocated and how much used?

I

don't agree

(until proven otherwise) with the assertion that Ghost copies the shadow volume data in Vista.

Do a search on Google for vssadmin and you'll find several articles on how to modify the system restore size. Here's one:

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/06/26/how-to-change-and-limit-system-restore-...

After you reduce it, take another Ghost backup. My bet is that your Ghost file backup size won't have changed.

I have to agree with you; the sums add up too neatly for that not to be the case.

Thanks for all your help, very much appreciated Grin

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John.

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	Re: Size Difference (NG12) Reply #9 - Mar 1^st, 2008 at 9:02am Just curious now, when you ran the vssadmin list shadowstorage command, how much space was originally allocated and how much space used on your pc? FYI, I reduced mine to 20gb. That's still a lot of system restore points.
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thomas

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Re: Size Difference (NG12)
Reply #10 - Mar 1^st, 2008 at 9:59am

John. wrote on Mar 1^st, 2008 at 9:02am:

Just curious now, when you ran the vssadmin list shadowstorage command, how much space was originally allocated and how much space used on your pc?

FYI, I reduced mine to 20gb. That's still a lot of system restore points.

Here are my results:

Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 20.149 GB
Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 20.802 GB
Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 22.214 GB

So it's more or less around the 20GB mark or about 15% as mentioned in the other thread. It really does shock me that that much space is being used TBH Cry

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John.

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Re: Size Difference (NG12)
Reply #11 - Mar 1^st, 2008 at 10:25am

FYI, my vss was even larger until I reduced it to 20GB. I could reduce it further, but since I have a lot of free space on my c: partition, and the fact that Ghost doesn't include it in the backup image, then I have left it alone for now.

So, to summarize your situation:

78GB = partition USED space
-20GB for volume shadow space
-3GB for page file (1.5 x 2 gb memory I am assuming)
-2GB for hibernation file (assuming again 2gb memory)
====
53 gb = amount of sectors that Ghost will backup. That pretty well matches your 54gb recovery point size!

I usually select "normal compression" which is what Ghost recommends. If you do, I would expect your recovery point size to drop to around 30gb. I've never had any problems with normal compression.

Ghost4me Ghost 9, 10, 12, 14, 15. Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7

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Pleonasm

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Re: Size Difference (NG12)
Reply #12 - Mar 1^st, 2008 at 1:05pm

Quote:

I don't agree (until proven otherwise) with the assertion that Ghost copies the shadow volume data in Vista

I cannot speak with respect to Norton Ghost 12 on this issue; but, I do know that ShadowProtect Desktop does include the “shadow copies” of files in its image backup. Personally, I would be very disappointed if the “shadow copies” did not exist in the image backup, since an image of a system volume should be exactly that: a true, cluster-for-cluster mirror of the source.

Of course, this is an empirical question, and it could be easily answered in a definitive manner by simply restoring a Norton Ghost 12 image and looking to see if “shadow copies” of various files – known to be present on the source volume – also exist in the restored version.

Perhaps a Norton Ghost 12 user on this forum could perform this test and report the results?

ple • o • nasm n. “The use of more words than are required to express an idea”

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John.

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Re: Size Difference (NG12)
Reply #13 - Mar 1^st, 2008 at 1:26pm

Pleonasm wrote on Mar 1^st, 2008 at 1:05pm:

I cannot speak with respect to Norton Ghost 12 on this issue; but, I do know that ShadowProtect Desktop does include the “shadow copies” of files in its image backup. Personally, I would be very disappointed if the “shadow copies” did not exist in the image backup, since an image of a system volume should be exactly that: a true, cluster-for-cluster mirror of the source.

Then, I suspect you are very disappointed because Ghost has never created a cluster-for-cluster mirror of the source.

Norton Ghost omits the pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys from its Ghost images.

Ghost 12 User Manual, page 53:
Quote:

Files excluded from drive-based backups
The following files are intentionally excluded from drive-based backups:
■ hiberfil.sys
■ pagefile.sys
These files contain temporary data that can take up a large amount of disk space.
They are not needed, and there is no negative impact to your computer system
after a complete system recovery.
These files do appear in recovery points, but they are placeholders. They contain
no data.

My statement regarding the VSS on Ghost 12, is evidently confirmed by Bill_Wood. So, one has the option as to whether to include the system restore files or not with the backup. Personally I don't see the need for them. If you restore a partition to last Friday for example, it is unlikely that you would want to then run a system restore to the Thursday before that. If you really think you need that, then get NG14 and check that option.

Quote:

NG 14 has an advanced option when defining a backup to "Perform full VSS backup"

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1202684531/15#15

Ghost4me Ghost 9, 10, 12, 14, 15. Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7

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Pleonasm

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Re: Size Difference (NG12)
Reply #14 - Mar 1^st, 2008 at 2:03pm

Quote:

Ghost has never created a cluster-for-cluster mirror of the source

Yes, Ghost4me, I am aware of the special cases of the HIBERFIL.SYS and PAGEFILE.SYS files. Nonetheless, please see An Image Is An Image for an empirical test demonstrating that Ghost does in fact create “a cluster-for-cluster mirror of the source”.

If Norton Ghost 14 allows the user to exclude the file “shadow copies” and a user wishes to do so, then that capability could be helpful. For myself, I (usually) accomplish the same objective by simply running the Disk Cleanup utility to delete “System Restore and Shadow Copies” before creating an image backup with ShadowProtect Desktop. In fact, based upon the article Automating Disk Cleanup Tool in Windows, one could run this utility automatically before an image backup using the Ghost option to execute a command before a backup begins.

Note that the manual for Backup Exec System Recovery 8 also contains no reference to a “Perform full VSS backup” option.

ple • o • nasm n. “The use of more words than are required to express an idea”

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