Rolling Incremental Backups

I saw in the wish list the desire to implement rolling incremental backups. It would be great if ATI could implement this within the product, but here is a simple way you can do this using a batch file.

First, create your schedule in ATI to place the full backup in a specific directory. For example, Q:\Backups\Current Backup

Each week run a full backup on say Sunday. Then on days Monday - Saturday run an incremental backup. This is done using ATI built in scheduler. Note, ATI calls both of these schedules as weekly. You just indicate which days of the week. Your full backup weekly job you will select "Sunday" and your incremental backup you select weekly job to run on each of the remaining six days.

Now, create some additional directories ... for example ...

- Q:\Backup\Week-1
- Q:\Backup\Week-2
- Q:\Backup\Week-3

Now create a batch file that will run prior to the running of your weekly ATI schedule (the full backup). This batch file will delete all files from Week-3 and move all files in Week-2 to Week-3, Week-1 to Week-2, and Current Backup to Week-1. So you can see that you will be rolling all the backup files down a week, ultimately clearing the Current Backup folder so you can start the new current week and deleting files that are more than 4 weeks old. The weekly backup creates the new full backup and the incremental backup jobs will just create the six incrementals you desire.

Here is an example of the command syntax.

@echo off
Rem Batch file for weekly Backup Mgt
Rem Delete the week 3 backups ...

del /q "Q:\Backups\Week-3\*.*"

Rem Now Move the each of other weeks' files down a directory ...
move /y "Q:\Backups\Week-2\*.*" "Q:\Backups\Week-3\"
move /y "Q:\Backups\Week-1\*.*" "Q:\Backups\Week-2\"
move /y "Q:\Backups\Current Backup\*.*" "Q:\Backups\Week-1\"

exit​

Save the file as a text file and give it the name beforeweekly.bat

Run it before each weekly backup using the pre/post commands field in your weekly scheduled ATI job. And if you want to shutdown the PC after the job completes, you can use the command shutdown -s -f ... just place that command to run after your weekly/daily backup job. Remember, if you use this technique, the beforeweekly.bat file runs ONLY BEFORE the weekly job, not the daily job.

Steve B.

 

Hello bisel,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are sorry for the delayed response.

Sharing your experience is very much appreciated.

If you have any further experience to share, please feel free to post it on this forum.

Thank you.
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Aleksandr Isakov