Acronis True Image

[Rex A. Butcher]

What ho one and all,

Running XP Pro sp3 (of course) and am a big fan of Acronis True Image. I make a back-up file every month, deleting the second last every time.

My OS is installed to a 60 gb partition is apparently now occupying about 50 gb. Don't know how it has grown so large but .......

The last ATI file was about two months ago, and is 29.5 gb. The one I have just taken a few hours ago is now 33.4 gb. What I don't understand is where has all this extra data come from. I have certainly not installed any large programs that would be taking up gb's of program file space. .

For what is it worth, the largest installed programs are a VM (about 12gb allocated) an old version of Photoshop, MS Word/Excel/ and an old version of AutoCad. All the other programs (and there probably are too many of them) are small (ish) utilities.

And yet, every time I take an image, the file grows. Why?

Thanks

Rex

[Midknyte]

My OS is installed to a 60 gb partition is apparently now occupying about 50 gb. Don't know how it has grown so large but .......

You can use Treesizefree to see what is taking up all that space. Did you run CCleaner?
http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml

Do you have the VM files on your C: drive also? You might need to shrink/compact those as well. I normally make 2 partitions; OS and Data. I put the VM application on C: and the VM files (.vmx) on D:

[Rex A. Butcher]

Yep, ran CCleaner before imaging. Also defragged. There are certainly some large spaces occupied; page file and hibernation are around 5 gb each, but I know about those. I have run ConfigSafe and if the saved entries build up, that takes a lot of space, as does System Restore. Deleted a lot of the ConfigSafe entries and turned SysRestore off (then back on) and that has freed up quite a significant chunk.

Yes, VM and its few files are on C: That seem to be about 14 gb of D&S. How do I move the VM (vmx) files to D:?

Also, found that Dropbox is creating a hell of a lot of files. Admittedly, all are only 1kb each but the folder D&S/username/AppData/Dropbox/shellext/I has over 10,000 files listed! Can those be deleted?

[Midknyte]

The pagefile and hiberfil.sys files are excluded from the backup, so that's not the problem.

Which VM are you using? .vmx is for VMWare. Basically, you would need to do is move the files to a folder on D:\, and then open them with VMWare again. It will ask if you moved or copied the files. You would choose Moved. You would also need to remove the old VM entry, since you moved the vmx files. See the following:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/mic...rnalId=1000936

Not sure why there would be so many Dropbox files in shellext, but you can delete them. Those are just logs.

[Rex A. Butcher]

I rarely use Dropbox and certainly the files are not taking up a lot of space, but based upon the date and time, I would say that Dropbox is accessing the internet five or six times a day.

My mistake, it's Oracel VM Virtual Box. don't know if that makes a difference.