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Backup Oddity

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Simon:
I only really use my laptop for emails, internet and non-essential tasks, so I've never really backed it up fully before.  Having had a disaster a few months ago, which resulted in having to restore Windows 10, and reinstall all my programs, I decided to invest in an additional 500Gb external hard drive on which to perform a full backup including Windows image.

The backup was done via the on board Windows utility, but strangely, the backup size is much larger than the actual amount of data showing on the laptop hard drive.  The laptop hard drive is 500Gb, which includes the Windows partition, and My Computer shows 252Gb of space remaining, however, the external drive with the new backup on it is showing 384Gb of used space, with only 82Gb remaining.  How is this so?   :dunno:

daveeb:
Simon I wonder has it backed up a hidden windows "restore" partition also ?

I think i'd have gone a bit bigger than 500 GB, I just bought a 4 TB WD for £70 something  :dunno:

Simon:
Yeah, but I only thought it had to backup the capacity of the hard drive, which is only half full.  The hard drive shows total capacity of 463Gb, so that's about 40Gb short of the supposed 500Gb but then they usually fall short anyway.  Not sure if a hidden recovery partition would account for that, but that's still only 40Gb, where has the backup found an extra 130Gb from somewhere.  Unless I'm being particularly thick, it just doesn't make sense.

daveeb:
Do you have any compressed folders which may have been expanded in the backup ?
I'm clutching at straws now.  :crazy:

Simon:
There are some compressed folders, but I don't know if the backup would have expanded them.  I may try with another backup utility to see if it does the same thing.

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