Do I do if my backup drive is full? Hi, everyone. Leo
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It's very much appreciated. So, your backup drive is full. What
do you do? Well, let's first figure out how you got there.
It is, I'll just say, inevitable. It is one of those
things where if you're taking backups as you should,
eventually, the drive on which you're making those backups is
probably going to fill up unless you've taken some kinds
of steps which we're about to discuss to make some room. All
you're really doing is accumulating backups. What do
you do? Well, that kinda depends on what it is you want,
how long you want it, how you use your backups. Let's talk
quickly first about the types of backups and you'll see that
a strategy will start to emerge that will help you understand
how best to manage your backup space and help you decide what
to delete cuz ultimately deleting is the answer when you
get to a full backup drive. Now, full backups are easy. A
full backup image is a copy of absolutely everything on your
machine. It's something that I recommend frequently. It's
something that I recommend prior to major changes. It's
something I recommend you do periodically. The problem with
full backups of course is that they're big. They're a copy of
everything. Even with compression offered by most
backup programs, the resulting files, the resulting backup
images are really big and that means that if all you're doing
is full image backups, you're gonna run out of disc space
pretty quick, right? You're making a copy of your machine
every time you do a backup without deleting any of them,
those are gonna get pretty big. Now, incremental backups which
is an approach I recommend are definitely more effective when
it comes to using disc space but they're more complicated.
The issue with incremental backups is that they rely on
the backups that came before them to the most recent full
backup image. So, the idea is you take a full backup and then
you do an incremental and an incremental and an incremental
and an incremental and then you start over with another full
backup. An incremental backup includes only those things that
have changed since the immediately preceding backup.
So, that means for example, a full backup will have
absolutely everything. The next incremental backup will include
only those things that changed since the full backup. The
incremental backup after that will include only those things
that have changed since that preceding incremental backup.
You get the idea and because they only contain what's
changed, they are much much smaller which means you can
actually save a lot more on your backup disk or to put it
the other way around, your backup disk won't fill up as
quickly. It. As quickly. It's still going to fill up
eventually. It's just not going to fill up as quickly. Now, the
issue of course is that if all you're taking is incremental
backups, you're actually at kind of risk for your backup
not working when you need it. Remember, I said that each
incremental backup depends on the backups that came before it
up to the immediately preceding full backup. That means that if
any of those incrementals in between are lost or damaged,
then everything from then on is useless. If you lose full
backup at the beginning of it. The whole scenario is useless.
I've heard of people who set up a full backup and then simply
do incrementals forever. A year later, they have one full image
backup, 365 incrementals. If anyone of those 365
incrementals fails, is lost, is damaged, or whatever, then
everything after that is lost. Don't do that. What I consider
to be a blended approach is the better approach. It's a trade
off between the robustness of your backups, the incremental
nature of your backups. In other words, you want backups
in my opinion every day and the amount of hard disk space you
have available. So, my blend, my preferred blend is a full
backup once a month. That's a full backup image plus
incremental backups every day. So, at worst, you've got a full
backup and thirty incrementals and then it starts over with a
new full backup and thirty incrementals and on and on.
It's a nice trade off. It gets you a daily resolution on your
backup images, your backup files but it actually makes
really good use of your disk space at low risk. So, what
happens when your disk fills up? What can you delete? Well,
that depends kind of on what you're using your backups for.
If all you care about is recovering from a system crash
like or a Windows update, right? Windows update happens,
it fails. You want to restore your machine to the state it
was in prior to the update. Okay, it really only need a few
days worth of backups, right? To be on the safe side.
Technically, you actually only need the one immediately
preceding whatever it was that work your machine. In this
case, that would mean with a blended approach, you would
need the most recent full backup and all of the
incrementals that happened since. That's it. So, to free
up disk space, that implies, you can delete any of the
backups that happened before that. Any of the incrementals,
any of the fulls before the one you always wanna be to go back
to. Now, in reality, we sometimes wanna go back further
than just the most recent crash or the most recent update or
the most recent break, right? Sometimes, we want to recover a
file from a month and a half ago. That's a judgement call
that you need to make. How far back do you think you might
need to go in order to recover a file? Then, make sure you
simply keep all of the backups that encompass that time span.
So, that means in the case of again, a blended approach, you
need the full backup that occur prior to that date and then all
of the incrementals and all of the subsequent full in
incrementals that happens since. Those are the ones you
keep. Everything before that you can delete. Now, the good
news here, again, it sounds complicated but the really good
news here is that most backup software these days including
my two recommendations, Macrium Reflect and Easeus ToDo,
we'll manage disk space for you. They will check the amount
of disk space before they make their backup and you can
configure what should happen if there's not enough room. It'll
give you options to delete the most recent, delete the the
oldest, delete something else. There's lots of ways to
automatically manage the disk space using your backup
software and that's what I do. I absolutely have macro and
reflect deleting the oldest full backup every time that the
disk space drops below enough room for the next backup to
happen. I also happen to save some of my other images in a
different place for long-term archival purposes but from a
purely backup standpoint, I end up with a couple of months
worth of. Yup, I can go back to any day in those 2 months and
another month or two prior to that of only the full backup
and Macromuffle is actually handling the disk space
automatically for me as it does its backup every night. So, the
bottom line is, what do you do when you run out of disk space
on your hard drive? You delete something. What you delete
depends on how you're backing up and my blended approach is
probably the most effective use of disk space while still
having good backups and how long you might wanna go back.
If you only ever need to recover from a catastrophic
failure, that means you wanna go back to something like in
the last day or two, that's all you need to keep. If you want
to be able to go back further, you need to understand which
backups you would need to keep to be able to go back further
and then delete everything older than that. I hope that
was helpful. I know that it's a confusing topic. For updates,
for related links to ask more questions, to leave comments,
visit askleo.com/3922. I'm Leo Notenboom, this is
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