How to avoid running out of space?

[ysgi]

I am trying to backup a drive to an external HD so that it can be taken off premesis every night. (Total disater paranoia).

For round numbers sake, say I have an 80 gig HD in my PC, 50 gigs USED.

and a 120 gig EXTERNAL - used only for backup purposes.

I have made an initial full backup using TI-8. and several incremental backups since. Actually one a day, to be safe.

It seem to me at this rate, I will run out of room on the EXT HD rather quickly.

Is there a way to seet the scheduler to overwrite the FULL backup say every week or two, then overwrite the Incremental backups. From my fiddling around with this, it seems that I can schedule a new Full B/U but it adds another FULL B/U and doesnt overwrite the original - same for the incrementals.

Can anyone explain this. If we can make it work, it will eventually be used on all pc's in my office.

Thanks,

ysgi

[Menorcaman]

Hello ysgi,

Check out this previous thread titled <HELP: Weekly Backup strategy> (http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=81964).

Regards

[ysgi]

I am not really concerned with the ability to go back more than the last day.

My concerns are merely EXT HD space. I have noticed that TI8 seems to add files at will. When I think it will overwrite my FULL B/U called MyBackup1, it actually creates another FULL called Mybackup11, or something like that. But leaves the original FULL B/U. I am sure I just dont know the proper way to use the software.

[Menorcaman]

I think I know what the problem is. If you are imaging to a FAT32 formatted drive then the image will be automatically split into approx 4GB chunks. Say your full backup is called BackupC.tib and it results in three chunks. TI will name these BackupC1.tib, BackupC2.tib and Backup3.tib. In order to overwrite these your next full image must be called BackupC.tib again, not BackupC1.tib.

The same rule applies if you choose the Create Image Wizard option to split the image manually.

If you read this much earlier thread titled <Overwriting Split Images> (http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=48423) you will see that I fell into this trap myself :-[.

Regards

[ysgi]

Thank you Menorcaman,

I will try that approach.

By the way, You are correct, my Western Digital EXT HD is formated to FAT32. Do you think that formatting it to NTFS would be beneficial?

-ysgi

[Menorcaman]

-{ Quote: "By the way, You are correct, my Western Digital EXT HD is formated to FAT32. Do you think that formatting it to NTFS would be beneficial?
" }-Hi ysgi,

Unless you want to read the image on a Windows 9x/Me system or subsequently burn the 4GB chunks to a DVD-ROM (UDF) compilation then, personally, I would convert the external drive to NTFS. It's a much more robust filing system.

Regards