I have Vista Home Premium. When I used the automatic backup feature I noticed
that the first backup seems to be a complete backup and requires 16gb -
thereafter each daily backup is 5-30mb. After a week of daily backups the
next backup is 16gb and then again smaller daily backups. The problem is that
the 100gb external drive receiving the backups runs out of space and of
course the auto backups end. Am I responsible for deleting backup files from
the external drive? and if so, should I delete a set of backups at a time (a
set being the 16gb bu and the daily bu's up to but not including the next
16gb bu). I thought that the auto backup feature would regularly overwrite
the older set of backups so it wouldn't require monitoring on the users part
but that doesn't seem to be the case. Do I understand this correctly - would
my deleting a set at a time cause any problems with the backup catalog?
Thanks for helping out.

My experience with auto backup to an external drive is that I have the
responsibility for deleting out-of-date backups. I make a weekly auto
backup. The backed up files & folders are in (for me)
K:\ComputerName\Backup Set date\Backup Files date\Backup files No.\etc.
There will be a series of these folders. Periodically once a month or so) I
go in and manually delete the oldest Backup Set(s) to
maintain ample freeboard on the drive. It has not been a problem.


"Mike531" <Mike531@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:00D77E8C-44CA-4707-A6FC-8B5F70A0D1B9@microsoft.com...[color=blue]
>I have Vista Home Premium. When I used the automatic backup feature I
>noticed
> that the first backup seems to be a complete backup and requires 16gb -
> thereafter each daily backup is 5-30mb. After a week of daily backups the
> next backup is 16gb and then again smaller daily backups. The problem is
> that
> the 100gb external drive receiving the backups runs out of space and of
> course the auto backups end. Am I responsible for deleting backup files
> from
> the external drive? and if so, should I delete a set of backups at a time
> (a
> set being the 16gb bu and the daily bu's up to but not including the next
> 16gb bu). I thought that the auto backup feature would regularly overwrite
> the older set of backups so it wouldn't require monitoring on the users
> part
> but that doesn't seem to be the case. Do I understand this correctly -
> would
> my deleting a set at a time cause any problems with the backup catalog?
> Thanks for helping out.[/color]

On Sat, 13 Oct 2007 18:34:17 -0500, "John Hanley"
<jphanley@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
[color=blue]
>My experience with auto backup to an external drive is that I have the
>responsibility for deleting out-of-date backups. I make a weekly auto
>backup. The backed up files & folders are in (for me)
>K:\ComputerName\Backup Set date\Backup Files date\Backup files No.\etc.
>There will be a series of these folders. Periodically once a month or so) I
>go in and manually delete the oldest Backup Set(s) to
>maintain ample freeboard on the drive. It has not been a problem.[/color]

I've been using BounceBack for years. While I have close to 2 TB worth
of data it rarely takes more than a few minutes to update my backup
which I do weekly. Best of all it presents a detailed list of all my
files and compares what has not been backed up yet or what is backed
up that I have since deleted. I few mouse clicks and the process
completes automatically. No mess, no fuss, piece of cake. You can even
do other things while this proceeds in the background.

I see a lot of people fall into one of two camps.

a. the why should I bother to backup crowd that never backups
b. the I better backup everything on the computer crowd.

The SMART way is just backup your data. I've been using personal
computers since they first arrived on the scene. Way before Apple or
any Windows box.

You know what... in nearly 30 years I never has any PC crash to the
extend I couldn't repair it WITHOUT needing to reinstall the OS.