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Backups set to incremental, but always seems to do full?

I have my backup job set as "incremental", and also have the scheme set to "Incremental backup scheme" with the number of backups to keep as 3. I expect this behavior to work as follows: the first backup will be a full backup which will take a long time, and the next 2 will be incremental backups that take significantly less time. However, all my backups seem to take a very long time - like, 8+ hours, so I need to leave my laptop running during the whole day while I'm at work so when I come home the backup is done or almost done. Is there a way I can verify whether my backups are incremental or not? How long should I expect an incremental backup to take? The drive I'm backing up is about 500 GB, but I made almost no changes since the last backup. Should the filenames for my backups indicate that they are full or incremental? My backup names are just "Disk Backup.adi", "Disk Backup1.adi", and "Disk Backup2.adi". It is just not practical for me to have my laptop backing up for hours every day.

Comments

  • From here it is very difficult tosay whats happend or could be wrong.
    I would suggest that you creat new jobs and try it again.
    What kind of backup it was.... system, disk or partition?
    Usually the first backup will be a full backup with the largest file size and longest time (without verify!!), the following tasks will be smaller and faster because only changed files and folders to the full backup will be safed.
    Do you have a drive of 500GB or 500GB of datas?
  • My backup job is a Disk Backup. The drive I am backing up is 1TB, but only has about 500GB of data at the moment. I initially set up the job without a schedule and it took about 9 hours or so. I then added both a schedule and a scheme (incremental backup scheme as described above). When I set up the scheme, there was a tick box that said "Create a full backup and always retain it before performing the scheme". I unticked that box since I already had a full  backup, under the impression that it wouldn't create a full new backup and instead do the incremental backups. When it backed up next, it just seemed to be taking around the same amount of time as the first backup, making me question if it was doing another full backup or incremental backup. Unfortunately that backup failed with the "bad sector" error, so I'm not sure what it was doing. I got the same error in a previous backup attempt and thought I had fixed it...to be honest I have been having a lot of trouble getting AOMEI Backupper to work and it is getting frustrating...
  • @Mdaily733, Could you try to re-create the backup task and enable the backup schedule and scheme when you create the task? Generally, if you enable the backup scheme on the existing backup task, it will first create a full backup, then perform incremental backups. The original full backup will not be managed by the backup scheme.
    As for the "bad sector" error, is it error code 33? Please try to restart Vss service under Task Manager-->Service, and then run backup again.
  • @admin It looks like it is working as expected now. I just let it run through another cycle of the scheme and now it makes sense. I think it was redoing full backups because I kept changing the scheme or something. I also have not had any errors in several days so if they pop up again I'll try following your suggestion.
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