Why does Acronis backup the whole size of the hard drive?
When I create a backup on my computer, it's backing up the main OS partition, along with the smaller partitions. Now, I think when it backups, it's backing up the used space so it doesn't really take too long. Here's the problem. When I try to restore from a backup, it gives me a list of the partitions: The main OS and the other partitions. For the main OS, it's showing the size at 931 gb. Why am I trying to backup THE WHOLE SIZE of the hard drive?! So when I go to restore all the partitions back, it starts the restore process and it is taking A LONG TIME for obvious reasons (it is restoring the size of the entire hard drive). This is not what I wanted. I wanted to back up and restore only the used space of the main OS partition, along with the other partitions. And even if I do attempt to restore from a Windows backup, it will inevitably fail during the restore process (i.e. sector errors (even though there's nothing wrong with my hard drive)) or after the restore process I'll run into a boot error because of a missing bootloader or something.
If I had known this was going to happen, I would have just copy and pasted, or using Acronis on desktop to backup, all the USED stuff on my main OS partition, plus the other partitions. Why would it do that?!
And this is not just with Acronis. If I try to restore a Manjaro Linux system from a backup image with Clonezilla, it takes just as long, if not longer. Why? Because it's trying to restore the size of the entire hard drive.
Yeah, maybe somewhere along the way I probably set one of my backups to backup sector by sector. I dunno, I just thought maybe it was safer or better to do that. I definitely did not want to restore the entire capacity of the hard drive/main OS partition back. I just wanted to restore the used stuff back to the partition.
What is the size of your backup image .tib file here?
If you are using sector-by-sector mode for the backup and your source drive is 1TB, then the backup image file size would be getting towards a similar size.
There is a difference between what you are backing up and the sizes shown when recovering as Acronis recognises the size of partition / drive where it came from and is being written to and will automatically adjust to try to fit into the available space, hence you can recover to a larger or smaller size drive and Acronis will try to fit the data to that size.
Gigabyte Aorus GA-AX370-Gaming 5 M/B; AMD Ryzen 1700X; 16gig RAM; 2 x 500 gig Samsung 970 EVO PCIe NVMe, 1 x 250 gig Samsung 960 EVO PCIe NVMe drives + other drives (Windows 10 Pro 64)
Gigabyte Aorus B360 Gaming 3M/B, Intel i5 9400; 16gig RAM; 1 x 500 gig Samsung EVO Plus PCIe NVMe + 1 x 250 gig Samsung 960 EVO PCIe NVMe + other drives (Windows 10 Enterprise 64)
Gigabyte Aorus H370 Gaming 3M/B, Intel i5 9400; 16gig RAM; 1 x 500 gig Samsung EVO Plus PCIe NVMe + 3 x Kingston HyerX Fury 240gig RAID 5 + other drives (Windows 10 Enterprise 64)
Synology DS414 NAS 4 x 4TB WD Red HDD