Unable to take incremental backup on windows7

**Elazar** · 15-12-2010

I am having the windows 7 operating system working on my system and I have a habit to take backup on regular basis. The thing here is that the system is not letting me to do the increment backup. I don't know why it is not letting me to do so but whenever I am trying to take the scheduled backup the process starts but after some time it freezes and taking a long halt it will give me an error message saying that the backup couldn't be created.

**windows_user** · 15-12-2010

I think the memory of you system is full and that is the reason why it is not letting you to take the backup. The thing here is that as you are taking the scheduled backup and the backup file is stored with the other entire one. And consuming the memory space and if the memory is full then it is very difficult for you to take the backup. So what I will suggest you here is that just move the old backup on any external source and always keep the latest one with you.

**Dolsy_bendal** · 15-12-2010

According to me why are you depending on the system for backup because it may turn to an untrusted source. If the system is not letting you to take the backup then you can just try and take the backup manually on any external source that is the external flash drive or a portable if possible. I guess portable will suit you if the data is more. I hope that doing this will help you to solve the issue.

**SalVatore** · 15-12-2010

Well it seems to me that the backup you take in windows 7 is quite different then the other operating systems like windows XP or windows Vista. If you take a backup then the system tends to create a image of that backup file and I guess that image is causing problems for you because it consumes approximate memory space as the backup file do. And if you don’t want the system to create thins backup file then you can just stop it by just unchecking the option called” Let Windows choose” . I hope that this will help you to resolve the issue.

**Elazar** · 16-12-2010

Thanks a lot for considering my problem but the thing here is that I am still not able to solve the issue. Actually I saved the settings in such a way that the new backup will replace the previous one. And the memory space will be saved automatically. But still it is giving me same problem, please help me to solve this because it has frustrated me a lot.

**tilsonpa** · 24-01-2011

I tried 2 things that seem to work. First I disabled the windows media player network sharing service. It seemed to work, somewhat as the backups were not as big. But I finally decided to check some files that were not updated, since the last backup, and they were in the new backup.
Then I used the registry hack that I saw on the web. AND THIS WORKS GOOD. I have included the notes, I copied from the web. Here they are.

Also see article below this one!!!!
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Windows Backup does not perform an incremental backup of media files when the Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service is enabled in Windows 7
View products that this article applies to.
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SYMPTOMS
When you back up media files by using Windows Backup on a computer that is running Windows 7, Windows Backup does not perform an incremental backup. Instead, Windows Backup performs a full backup.
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CAUSE
This issue may occur if you have the Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service enabled on the computer. The Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service indexes media files. By doing this, the service changes the metadata of the files for tracking purposes. When you back up your media files, Windows Backup detects that these files were changed and then performs a full backup of the media files.

Note To prevent this issue, do not save multimedia content to the Public folder (%SystemDrive%\Users\Public).
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WORKAROUND
To work around this issue, use one of the following methods.

Method 1: Exclude the media files from being indexed (recommended)

To do this, move all the multimedia content from the Public folder (%SystemDrive%\Users\Public) to a specific user or to any other folder that can be shared.

For more information about how to share files and folders, visit the following Microsoft Web site:
Share files with someone
Method 2: Stop the Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service

To do this, follow these steps:
1. Click Start, type Services.msc in the Search programs and files box, and then press ENTER.
2. In the list of services, right-click Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service, and then click Stop.
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How to set up Incremental backup via the registry
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/...2-41edaed1e2f9

We have introduced automatic full backup feature in Windows7 to help customers who run into a situation where they never create full backups. When their backup target eventually gets filled, they are left with only one backup set to delete. They need to delete the entire backup set to resume backups and so end up in a situation where they do not have any backup.

The rules that determine when to take automatic full backup are:
1. If previous full backup was taken 1 year back
2. Ratio of size of deleted files + older versions of files in current backup set is 50% or more of the size of the current backup if it were full.

We deliberately did not allow forcibly starting new backup set or configuring these rules through our UI because we did not want to confuse users about full backups, incremental backups, automatic full backups.

If you find that these settings do not match your requirements, we allow the defaults to be tweaked using registry keys.

Registry key to control enable/disable automatic switching to full backup:
Path: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsBackup\AutomaticFullBackup
Name: Enabled
Type: DWORD
Value: 0 indicates automatic full backup is disabled, non-zero indicates it is enabled
Default if not specified: 1

If this key does not exist under the AutomaticFullBackup, then create it “Enabled”. See above.

Registry key to control the time period when backup should automatically switch to full:
Path: SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsBackup\AutomaticFullBackup
Name: TimePeriodInDays
Type: DWORD
Value: Count of days
Default if not specified: 365
Registry key to control the % of deleted/missing + older versions of files that determines whether to switch to full backup:
Path: SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsBackup\AutomaticFullBackup
Name: OlderFilesSizePercentage
Type: DWORD
Value: Percentage value from 0 to 100
Default if not specified: 50

Hope that helps.

Thanks,
Sriram [MSFT]

**tilsonpa** · 24-01-2011

I didn't quite finish my story. When I went into the registry, there was no entry under the path HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsBackup\AutomaticFullBackup, so I added a DWORD key called "Enabled" and set it to 0 (this means incremental). When the backup ran, it gave an error and said something like "could not find a full backup, backup aborted". I then deleted all of the backups on the drive and went in and changed the registry key "Enabled" to 1, for a new full backup. I ran the backup and it created a full backup. A full backup, in my case, were only the directories I had selected for the backup. Then I worked on my PC for a little while and created some new files, and updated some more. I then went into the registry and changed the key "Enabled" to 0. I ran the backup again and it was successful. It only backed up the new, and changed files. Hope this works for you.