How to schedule alternating full/differentials?

Hello, All.

I want to use the Acronis TI Home's Scheduler feature to make a differential backups daily, and full backups weekly of a certain Folder subtree (not a whole partition).

I want all these backups to persist unless I manually delete them. It would seem that I could accomplish this by making two schedule entries - one for the full backup, to run Weekly, and a separate one for differential, to run daily.

However, the scheduler hard-codes the name of the full backup, so that it always overwrites the previous backup file. I want it to append a date or at least a number to the filename.

Likewise, the differential (or incremental) scheduled task hard-codes the name of the full backup on which it is based, so that, even if I renamed the backup.

Any ideas on how to accomplish this, in the absence of a feature like this one:

Feature Suggestion: Provide an easy "Make every Nth backup Full" option when scheduling an automatic differential or incremental, and append date to filename.

Thanks,
Soundman

 

How about -
FULL image named BACKUP gets created on Monday; DIFFs get created Tuesday - Friday and are automatically named BACKUP2 – BACKUP5.
You could run a pre backup command associated with the FULL backup to rename BACKUP – BACKUP5, adding the date or whatever (NameDate is a very nice, free utility). This would fail the first time since no such files exist but you could code the batch/script file to ignore the error or just create dummy files with these names before the first run.
NOTE **** AFAIK there are pointers in each file that connect it to the others in the set. Therefore I believe you would have to rename all the files in a set back to their original names before restoring from them.

 

That's a good idea. I'll give it a shot.

That's pretty annoying. I will try doing a restore on a renamed set of base + differentials and report back whether it depends on the names remaining unchanged.

 

OK. I tried this. Renaming the backup and the differentials caused no trouble as long as the full backup and differentials (or, presumably, incrementals) were renamed in the same way.

I guess it's time to write some scripts

 

Hello Soundman,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are sorry for the delay with the response.

Please take a look at this previous post of mine providing the example of a batch file automatically renaming backups in accordance with the current date.

Please also take a look at the respective Microsoft Knowledge Base Article explaining standard Windows scripting rules.

If you have any further questions concerning Acronis software, please feel free to submit a request for technical support or post any of them on this forum. We will certainly try to help you in resolving any issues.

Thank you.
--
Alexey Popov

 

Although this script I think is even more simple BUT EFFECTIVE!

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=135562