How many incrementals?

How many incrementals is it safe to add to a full backup?

Or to put it another way: is there any reason to do a new full backup rather than carry on adding incrementals? (assuming that I have enough space for either).

 

My personal experience has been to do the full backups if you have the space
rather that messing around with the incrementals. Additionally, I also found that Acronis (for me, at least) did a much "cleaner" job of deleting the oldest full backup to make room for the newest backup. Example, I have a full backup scheduled M-F for a partition that contains my business data. I have another full backup scheduled for my system that runs daily. Both backups go to the Security Zone and have already saved my neck twice! I tried the incremental and for some reason when the Security Zone got low on space it did not delete and create a new full backup. So, for peace of mind I just do the full backups and run them overnight. Works like a charm. Now, can't wait for the update so I can mount the drives and pull individual files!

 

Oh, one more item...

Make sure you create enough space in your Security Zone to carry at least 2 full backups, just in case one is corrupted.

 

Actually I can't use the Security Zone as I back up to a network share, not a local drive. So I have to deal with deleting old backups manually. That's one of my reasons for preferring incrementals: they take up so little space that I won't need to worry about deleting old backups for a long time.

Re: corruption. Yes, it's a pity that the scheduler doesn't allow you to force a check after each backup. No doubt that's in the wishlist somewhere.

 

Veryfying after BU is a *must* - I've never seen BU software without a verify option.

As for housekeeping incremental backups....

I'm working on a script called "TIRoll" that will do rolling backups.

Just run a few minutes before the Acronis BU.

Command line will be as follows:

Tiroll [subst drive] [Backup map] [Number of base backups]

Basically this will do the following:

* Under the backup map, a number of base backup maps will be made
* The subst drive will point a drive letter towards the current backup map
* Tiroll keeps track of the month number using registry - when the month is changed since last backup, subst will map to the next backup map (or first one if it reached the last) and clear this map out, ready for a new base BU

Just schedule a daily incremental backup to the subst drive letter, and you'll keep a number of base backups, rolling over in the next map when the month has changed. At the start of the new month, that map is cleared out and Acronis will automagically do a base backup in that map.

Later I'll add functionality to do weekly based BU's. (For example four backups per month) and maybe a fuction to only keep the last out of these four backups in the "old" months, to conserve backup disk space.

Working this way is also perfect to use Karen's replicator to sync this "master backup map" to external USB drives (which can then be swapped weekly to keep a BU offsite) as this method keeps this replication as small as possible.

If anyone is interested, please offer me a place on a website where I can host this program. I'll release it freeware together with the (ugly, i'm a lousy programmer) code.

 

Sounds like a great idea. You could always host it on SourceForge or one of the other free source code hosts. There are quite a few. And if anyone doesn't like your code they can always tidy it up

 

Tonio - send me a PM when you are ready. I should be able to host it.

 

OK guys I've got an early beta, I'll post the link as soon as MiniMax uploads the zip fle.

Unfortunatly I can't attach the ZIP to the forum, it's not allowed.