Periodic Full Backup

I have setup Acronis so that my system has a full backup and every 2 days it does an incremental backup. This is to an USB attached external drive.

At some point, these incremental backups are going to take up too much space and I want to do another Full backup and then a new series of incremental backups. I guess that i can do this manually but after one or 2 times, I will forget and my backups will start failing when my external drive is full.

I have read the documentation and I don't see any way to schedule a periodic full backup and the restart the incremental and remove the obsolete versions.

Is there a way to automate this? If not automated, is there a semi automated way to do it?

Thanks for any advice....

 

If you create a Secure Zone that is large enough to hold at least two backup cycles (Full + incrementals) then TI will manage the space in the Secure Zone without any intervention. When the Secure Zone is full TI will re-use the space occupied by the oldest full backup and its related incrementals. Just check your logs occasionally to make sure that backups are successful.

 

Hello john Thomas,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We recommend you to you create full backups every week (or every 2 weeks, or every month) and incremental backups every day (or every 2 days). In this case each week (each 2 weeks, each month) the full backup will be replaced with the newly created one.

If you store the image archive on your hard drive we also recommend you to create Acronis Secure Zone. The images saved to Acronis Secure Zone are deleted automatically if required, using the following scheme to clean up Acronis Secure Zone:
- If there is not enough free space in Acronis Secure Zone to create an image,
then Acronis True deletes the most old full image with all subsequent incremental backup images.
- If there is only one full image (with subsequent incremental backup images) left
and full backup is in progress, then this only full image (with subsequent incremental backup images) is deleted.
- Otherwise (only one full image left, and incremental backup is in progress) then
you will get out of space error. In this case you will have to either create full
image or increase the Acronis Secure Zone size.

Thank you.
--
Irina Shirokova

 

Be careful. If you do create an Acronis Secure Zone on an external hard drive just make sure you don't activate the Acronis Startup Recovery Manager as well. If you do and the external drive is either switched off or disconnected when your system is booting then it will freeze.

Regards

 

Good advice Menorcaman.

 

Thanks for the information. I went back to the documentation and I see that I skipped reading the section on Secure Zone. I guess that I thought it had something to do with security not periodic backup.

I think that it would be good if on your web site you had some documented backup scenerios.

John