I really do not know what is normal size for a system image of windows 10, but mine takes up 500 GB of 1 TB harddisk. That seems to me a little bit excessive.
Is there a tool I can use to make it smaller without disrupting it.
What tool did you use? WIndows built-in?
An image made with Macrium Reflect will be about 1/2 the size of the occupied space on the drive that you imaged.
For instance:
If your system drive is 1 TB with 400 GB occupied; the image file will be somewhere near 200 GB.
That's with Macrium standard compression. There is a high compression setting, but as I recall it does NOT save a lot of space.
Your other option is to reduce the space used on C before you make the image. You can use something like Disk Cleanup to help with that, or consider general maintenance such as uninstalling applications you don't use, etc.
If you keep your personal data on C, you can usually make C much smaller by moving your data to some other partition on the same drive or even to another drive entirely.
Then you'd make an image file of that much smaller C, saving a lot of space.
oeivinr,
If you have two internal drives then you can reduce your OS drive usage significantly by "relocating" all your own files to the second drive.
- System images capture the whole of the OS drive not just the Windows installation itself so if you have your own files on that drive they will be part of the image. That's why it is currently so large.
- If you relocate your own files, your OS system image will be less than 40GB whichever imaging tool you use because you will only use less than 40GB of your OS drive.
- This arrangement will also make the creation of system images much, much quicker [even on a computer from 2005, my system images only take 25 mins to make & to restore].
If this is relevant to your situation then see Relocating user folders in Windows 7 and Windows 10 - Forum article
If you only have a single disk then you can "partition" it to get the benefits of relocation.
- I cannot find a TenForums tutorial on this subject even though I thought there was one. Perhaps one of the others will chip in with a suitable link for guidance on doing it.
- My own post on the subject is a decent-enough explanation - see my 19th May 2015 post under the username Tryx3.
- If I had to do the job now I would not use the built-in Disk management tool [C:\Windows\System32\diskmgmt.msc] but MiniTool partition wizard [free].
Denis
Hi again,
Thanx for all your suggestions, but unfortunately they don't apply to my system because I made a mess of describing it to you.
Let me try again. First of all my, system drive (C:) is not 1 TB. It is the data drive (D:) which is 1 TB. My system drive is 103 GB. Further more, system image file is not that big, only 90 GB which I think is reasonable and it resides on the D: drive.
What takes up so much space are are the backup periods (backup files), so my question is how many of them can i delete?
I used the windows built-in tool. Backup and restore
MS have deprecated their image backup feature and recommend using a 3rd party tool.
Macrium Reflect Free is this forum's overwhelmingly favourite tool, with several excellent tutorials in tutorial section.
Personally, I would delete all backups and start afresh using MRF.
Re. those backups, it sounds like you have schedule set or something like that and it is backing up say daily or weekly.
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