XP Pro backup utility

[jonathaw]

I'm just full of questions! So I'd like to back up my computer, fair enough, right? XP Pro has a built in backup thingy and I tried to use it. I have 2 hard drives, one is 20 GB and is full of music. The other is 120 GB and is the system drive; only 33 GB is used. When I made a backup of EVERYTHING on the computer (as opposed to just my documents and settings folder or something) it came out to be a 70 GB backup file. This seems way too big, and should be more like, oh say 53 GB???
So, I went into advanced mode and chose to backup only the system drive which if you recall is 33 GB full. This creates a 20 GB backup file.
I realize that 1024 bytes != 1 Kb, but my math isn't THAT wrong... Any ideas as to what this thing is trying to save, and if I'll be ok only backing up the system drive? (I already have the music backed up on dvds)

[dparm]

My guess is that it backed up your Pagefile and Hibernation files too, those can easily be 1GB+ each.

If you enable the viewing of hidden and protected files (in the Folder Options control panel), you can see these on the root of a local drive. Most of the time, the pagefile.sys is stored on C:, but some people opt to place it on a non-System drive to speed things up.

You might try disabling Hibernation and temporarily turning off your pagefile (or setting it to the smallest possible size), and recreating the backup image. If it decreases in size, that was your problem.

[abudhu]

Use GHOST instead.

http://www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/ghost_personal/

Works wonders.