Holy cow! Why is it so hard to overwrite files?

Beyond frustrated.

I've waited for over a year thinking that Acronis would make some improvements with TI10 Home to make it easy to overwrite the previous day's differential files. Not everyone wants to fill their hard drive up with dozens of differential files. But nooooo, there is still no "Overwrite File" button using the Wizard. I just want one differential file. I don't want to have to delete files everyday. Is that too much to ask?
Come on already, this is supposed to be a "Home" version!

I'm not a programmer and don't want to be. Batch files? What the heck is that? Just gimme a button to select; it's a "Home" version after all. What's the point of a "Wizard" other than to make things easier?

It shouldn't have to be this way.

 

Instead of differentials just make a complete image of drive every time with the same file name. Differentials are useless by themselves and only represent what has changed since the last time.That's what I do each night with a scheduled backup in TI9 B3677.

 

Well, shoot, I can do a full back-up everyday with the free software I got with my hard drive.

I could have saved myself money and not even bothered with True Image, but I would rather do a differential back-up to save time backing up. A full back-up can take hours and hours... and hours.

Why is it so hard to just have a full back-up file and one differential file that matches up with the full file and then each day have a new differential file overwrite the old? It shouldn't be that tough to do. But it is.

 

I also take a full backup and it overwrites the previous .tib-file automatically, if I use the same name and I use ATI for more than a year.
Also ATI has fortunate users.

 

As a "Home" user, if all you ever wanted to do was backup your DATA files then there seems little incentive to use anything else other than the Backup & Restore utility that comes with Windows (assuming you use Windows as your OS).

What you cannot do with the Windows Backup & Restore (or any other "Free" utility that may have been bundled with your computer) is create bootable image archives of your system partition. For that you need ATI or similar.

To obtain the best from your computer and your backup application, I strongly recommend that you separate your System and Program files from your Data files. Ideally you should do this by having 2 hard disks, one for the System and Program files and one for the Data files. If that is not an option then you should at the very least create separate partitions for these file categories.

I agree with "thomasjk" in that I always recommend creating a full image of the System and Program partition, which for all practical purposes need only be done once a month to coincide with the Microsoft monthly Windows update. There is seldom a real need to do it more often than monthly.

Your Data files should of course be backed-up daily. You could use either the "Image" or the "Files and Folders" method. If disk space in an issue then, for the purpose of backing up Data files I suggest that you may consider the Incremental backup procedure rather than the Differential backup. It would also be a really good idea to create a new full backup of your Data files once a month, and once you were satisfied that the new full backup was functional, you could then clear out the previous full backup and the daily incrementals; or an even better idea would be to move the "old" backup archive onto DVD or Flash as an extra level of data insurance.

Although many tasks can and should be automated, the data on your computer is so important that a small amount of manual input and personal supervision of the process is always a good idea.

 

Tabvla,
Nice writeup. Clear & concise.

Tonkin,
It sounds like you might be allowing neatness and convenience to overrule the need for some redundacy. Backups and restores are not perfect science and it does not matter which program or which methods used. Over my many years, I have been exposed to a variety of backup methods--from large tape reels up thru some of the more recent methods.

It is not unusual for the information you need to be strewn across several backups--some not recoverable. If you only have the most recent, then you could miss out. If my interpretation is correct, I would encourage you to rethink your procedures from a security standpoint and retain whatever number of backups needed to provide that security.

 

Actually, I agree with the original poster! Differential backup files *should* optionally overwrite themselves after verifying if that is what the user desires. Even better if Acronis could include this feature as a user defined option to rotate after 'n' cycles (where '1' of course is overwrite).

In a corporate environment, where storage capacity isn't an issue and security policies may require every change to be retained, I can see the sense in accumulating differentials. However, in a home system, once a differential is made against a full backup, the previous differentials are invariably redundant. It would be nice if True Image had the flexibility of NTBackup in this capacity, even if True Image is a more complete backup utility overall.

 

If you want your Backups to occur without any user input or supervision then you should combine the ATI functions "Backup Locations" and "Schedule Tasks".

In Backup Locations you set the rules for the backup and in Schedule Tasks you set the time for when the backup will occur.

To address the original issue raised by "tonkin", you would set the rule for "Maximum number of backups" to "2". Your backup archive would then consist of the original FULL backup and 1 x Differential backup.

You manually create the first FULL backup and the first Differential. After that Schedule Tasks will run the backup in accordance with the rule that you have set in Backup Locations, which in terms of this example means that you will always only have the original first FULL backup and the most current Differential because you have set the maximum number of backups to "2".

The user does not have to bother with Filenames as this part of the process is dealt with automatically by ATI.

NOTE

The comments that I made in my previous post are still just as valid irrespective of how much or how little user input you want to devote to the process.

 

Thanks for the info Tabvla, but it doesn't work.

I backup to a NAS and have been struggling for a week trying to get it work. I just came across another thread with others having problems with Backup Location and NAS. https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=155320&highlight=0x400003

It turns out you cannot do it. Groan. it's a bug and Acronis says, "It will be fixed in one of the future builds of Acronis True Image 10.0 Home." Ugh, yet more waiting. Geez, you would think they would have tested Backup Locations over a network before they released 10.0.

Which brings up the point once again, why is it so hard to overwrite differential files?

 

The functionality underlying "Backup Locations" is most often found only in corporate products. As far as I know Acronis are the first to offer this advanced functionality with an entry-level Home product. Combining the ATI functions "Backup Locations" and "Schedule Tasks" does create a completely autonomous backup process - and it DOES work in almost every scenario.

ATI v10 is the first release of this functionality in the Home product. As with any software product it is to be reasonably expected that there will be some bugs in the first releases. The fact that there is a bug with regards to NAS is important but not completely unexpected. There are numerous variables in any NAS setup (hardware drivers; different operating systems; network protocols; hard and soft Firewalls; file-sharing security rules..... ). It would be something of a miracle if a software manufacturer got it right first time.

It would be nice if Acronis spent more money on QA, but everything is relative. Perfect software may well be available on planet Zen but has still to find its way to planet Earth.