Incremental backups

I made a full backup to an external drive a couple of months ago and have been using nightly incremental backups ever since. Do I need to keep all the incremental backs since my full one in order to be able to restore my full system or can just keep one incremental backup plus the original full back enought? If I only need the incremental plus the full why is there such size variablility? Some of my incremtals are 12 gigs and and last nights is only 500 megs. What's the deal with that?

Also, is there a way to manage the incremental backups? After a while the fill up my external hard drive. It would be great to be able to just keep a set number of them.

Thanks for any help.

 

Yes you do need to keep ALL the incrementals following a full backup or you will not be able to restore in the event of a problem with your PC. I don't know if you are backing up to the Secure Zone but that's what I would recommend as it's safer and you can also have the system manage your backups there. If you only do one full backup and then incrementals you will eventually run out of space for your backups. This is because of the fact that you need to keep the full backup and all the incrementals that are related to that full backup. To have the system manage the space in the Secure Zone correctly you need to have a backup strategy such that you occasionally do a Full backup instead of an incremental. Depending on how often you want to backup I suggest maybe a FULL backup on a weekly basis and INCREMENTAL on a daily basis. You can adjust that schedule to meet your own needs. The space allocated to the Secure Zone is managed like this:-

When the Secure Zone is full and there is no room for your latest incremental backup then the oldest full backup and all it's incrementals are deleted from the Secure Zone to make room for the addition of new backups. That means that you need to allocate sufficient space in the Secure Zone to accomodate at least 2 backup cycles (a cycle being one full and how ever many incrementals you choose to do before yourr next full backup). It is preferable to allow room for 3 full cycles in my opinion as that gives you some leeway if backups are sometimes larger than you expect.

It is true that incremental backups can vary enormously in size. An incremental backup records 'changed' sectors and the size of the backup reflects how many sectors have changed since the last backup. If you have just run a defrag on the disk that you are imaging then many sectors will have changed as the defrag program moves files around the disk.

Hope this helps you understand more about how TI works.

 

what is the difference between a acronis.tib file and a mybackuo.tib file?

 

None. You can name an Acronis image (.tib) file anything you want. People tend to use the generic term "acronis.tib file" because, generally, they have no idea what name other users have chosen for their own image files.

Regards

 

Hello alexan07,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Incremental backup contains all data modified since the last preceding backup (full or incremental). To restore from an incremental backup, one needs to have the full backup and all preceding incremental backups. It's a good idea to make a full image on a weekly basis and an incremental image on a daily basis and store it in Acronis Secure Zone.

Thank you.
--
Irina Shirokova

 

My internal drive is 200 gig. I'm backing up to an external 250 gig USB drive.

What's the best way to automatically setup a backup routine that will not run out of room once my incremental backups exceed my external drive's space? It would seem to me, given that the external drive is larger than the internal one, I should be able to keep a current backup without running out of space. This is not true if I need to keep ALL incremental backups, as they startup to add up and fill up the space on my external drive.

Right now, I'm creating a full backup, but I had to delete my old full backup in order to do so. Not the best practice if something happens to my PC while my back is being done. As far as I can tell, unless my external drive is x2 my internal one, there is no other way to do this. Am I correct?

 

Hi, this is exactly the issue I'd like explained. I have a 160Gb usb disk backing up a 110Gb internal HD (only 28Gb in use). I do not intend to use the secure zone.

I am currently planning on a monthly full backup and a weekly incremental backup i.e. two sceduled tasks, one monthly and one weekly.

a) will I get 1 full and four incremental backups each month by this strategy?

b)what happens in the second month, do they get overwritten or does another set of files get created?

Any advice for a new user of TIv8 greatly appreciated - the simpler and more easily understood the better please <img src="http://pics.miarroba.com/caretos/lol.gif" alt="Laughing 8" />

 

Whenever you create a full backup the previous full backup is then overwritten. Any incrementals are then effectively orphaned and will be overwritten as the incremental images get produced.

 

OK thanks, so I get one Full and four separate Incrementals? Or do I have to set schedules for incremetal1, incremental2 etc to run 4-weekly?

And if I want to keep the first copy do I run Full-a and Full-b on an 8-week schedule, with incremental-a1, incremental_b1 etc to relate to the relevant back-ups?