Windows 7 Backup Creates a Single Backup Set
My wife and I both have Windows 7 ultimate. We backup files every night through Windows 7 Backup to a third Windows XP machine with a 500GB drive. When we run out of disk space, there is only one GIANT backup set for my computer and so I can't delete any old backups (without deleting my only backup). On the other hand, she gets a new backup set every two or three days and I can easily manage her old backup sets. Her computer is set to do a system image plus her folders. My computer is set to just backup my folders. I have about 160GB of data in my folders, whereas she has 10GB of files. Why does Windows 7 backup my computer to a single backup set? Is there any way to force it to start a new backup set periodically?
March 20th, 2010 4:55pm

Hi, Can you please check what is the size of your backup set? There are some rules according to which Windows backup decides to take full backup like: 1. Size of data changed since last full backup. If the amount of data changed since last full backup is >50% of original data, full backup triggers. 2. Full backup will trigger itself after every 365 days. I assume that your backup set is be very large and as there are no changes in the data, backup keeps on taking incremental backups. Though on your wife's machine as the data itself is very less, even small changes in data is making the first rule trigger and thereby creating full backups. Hope this explains your issue. Thanks, Neha
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March 23rd, 2010 9:51am

We found that if “Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service” is enabled, media files will be backed up every time. That means no incremental backup for media files. Maybe that is the reason that your backup is so large.Arthur Xie - MSFT
March 23rd, 2010 10:59am

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