Acronis weird one

blakka · 21 May 2007 at 14:01

I downloaded a trial version of Acronis after reading good reports about it on here. I decided I wanted to make a backup of a load of data that I had clustering my HD. All of the data I wanted to backup totalled to 20GB's worth. I went ahead and selected the "maximum" compression option as I wanted to crush down the size of the data.

Here comes the problem :-

After the backup/compression had finshed, i checked the size of the backup file that acronis made and to my suprise it was still 20GB :confused:

Am I doing something wrong here?

swinnie · 21 May 2007 at 14:23

Are you wanting to backup the drives ASWELL AS compressing or just compress?

ByteJuggler · 21 May 2007 at 14:26

What files are you backing up/compressing? Data that is already highly compressed, e.g. MP3's, AVI's, ZIP's RAR's etc will not typically compress further much using pretty much any type of lossless compression scheme. That's just the way it is, and not Acronis's fault.

blakka · 21 May 2007 at 14:30

The files that I am backing up are video files. Most of the video files are camcorder recording's which are quite large (not compressed).

Are you wanting to backup the drives ASWELL AS compressing or just compress?

No I don't want to backup the drives, I just want to backup the data while at the same time compressing it.

ByteJuggler · 21 May 2007 at 15:40

blakka said:
The files that I am backing up are video files. Most of the video files are camcorder recording's which are quite large (not compressed).

Some flavour of MPEG? Then it is already compressed... Most video files are either MPEG 1/2 or MPEG4/DIVX/XVID or somesuch. They won't compress well if at all.

Also, video data generally don't compress very well losslessly, so even if it's RAW format you'll need to pre-encode it into something manageable before backup (e.g. MPEG4 or DIVX or XVID) if you want to reduce the size substantially.