Backup Strategy

I can't seem to get Acronis Home 11 to work the way I want.

Originally what I wanted to do was have a Full Backup run once a month, an Incremental run once a day and an Differential run once a week. The theory/strategy being that after the Differential ran, the Incremental's would build off of it, then when the Full ran, the Incremental's and Differential's would run off of it.
I realized it doesn't quite work that way, so I scrapped the Differential backups and just did Full (Monthly) with Incremental (Weekly). Problem is that after a Full backup it doesn't reset the entire backup volume back to one Full archive that the Incremental's can then build off of. Instead I have a continuous sprawling backup that will eventually fill my backup drive.

To restate more clearly, I'd like the backup volume to be reset to a single Full archive each month, that is then built off of by Incremental backups.
Is there a way to achieve what I'm trying to do?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

I would also love information about how to make this happen. We rotate 2 external HDDs in our backup schedule weekly. Would be great if there was a strategy to have new incremental backups build upon full backups.

Saturday: Full backup on HDD1
Sun-Fri: Incremental on HDD1
Saturday: Full backup on HDD2
sun-Fri: Incremental on HDD2

 

I don't do incrementals and differentials but I think you are not changing the filename of the new full backup. AFAIK, TI looks at the filenames for the archive to base the incremental backups.

Until somebody who knows more about it than I do comes along .......

 

If you run a FULL and call the image file BACKUP, you will get a file named BACKUP.tib.
If you then run an INC based on the FULL, you get a file named BACKUP2.tib.
The next INC will be named BACKUP3.tib.
If you then rerun the FULL, it will overwrite BACKUP.tib but it will not delete any other files. The others will remain, but are orphaned and of no use.
The next INC you run will overwrite BACKUP2.tib and so on.

 

Do these drives physically replace each other? IOW, when in place, are they always the same drive letter?
If so, just set up a FULL task to run on Saturday, and an INC task to run Sunday through Friday. As long as you swap drives after the Friday INC and before the Saturday FULL, you should be OK.
I don’t think there is anything in the task that specifies that a particular drive must be used as the target.
As mentioned above, the old files will be overwritten, but not deleted.

 

Yes, this is our setup. Same drive letter.

So to summarize: Use the same root backup filename (backup.tib) for both the full backup and the incremental backup when setting each up. The incremental will build off the full that is in place?

Correct?

 

Yes. If the FULL has already been run, you can just select it when setting up the INC. Otherwise, use the exact same name for both.

 

This is pretty much what I want to do, but that's not the way it's working now.
The FULL isn't overwriting BACKUP.tib, it's just creating another file like INC, and once the FULL had run, the next day INC just creates a new file and doesn't overwrite.
I've been running this backup for about 2 months now and my .tib files are numbered over 40.

 

Without the exact file names and seeing the way the tasks are set up I can only assume that something is not set up right. I use this strategy on this PC and it always works.

 

One thing I have noticed about TI11 is that if you use an image file as the source of an incremental or differential backup, the backup parameters of the source image when it was made override whatever setting you might have for the current task.

Here is what I mean: I created a scheduled task that would create an image backup and then make a differential backups for 13 days. Then it would make a new image backup and then differential backups for 13 days. I decided that I wanted to make the image backup and then differential backups for 6 days. So I edited the task accordingly. Well, after 8 days it was still making differential backups. So, I moved the backup to a different directory and started the task manually. It created an image backup and after 6 differential backups, created a new image backup.

I have not investigated this beyond what I report here. but I thought it might be useful information.

S-