TI 11 - poor implemantion of backup consolidation.

I am a user of TI 11, all backups go to a TI managed backup location on a network drive.

I have been experimenting with managed backup locations so that I do not have to delete my oldest backups manually. I have to say I am very disappointed with the way this has been implemented. For the way we use this software, the task would never actually complete in any sort of reasonable time period.

Here is how we have set things up.

1) System partition is backed up, and sent to the managed location on a NAS drive. That means all data has to crawl over the network. Yes it is Gigabit, but it does still take time.
2) Incremental backups are used.
3) A new full backup is created every 7th time (7 days)
4) The managed backup location is told not to store more than 14 backups (two weeks worth)
5) The 15th backup is created, then Acronis starts to apply the backup consolidation rules. Now this is not ideal, it would be better for those rules to kick in before the next backup is made. This is especially true if you are managing the location by size. I do however understand why doing it this way is the easiest method.

What happens next however is unbelievable. Acronis takes the first full image, and attempts to consolidate the first incremental backup into it. Once it has done this, it then copies all the other incremental backups into some sort of renamed backup set. I don't know what it wants to do after this, as we have all grown old and given up.

To put it into perspective. A full backup is about 25Gb, takes 30 mins. Increments take 10mins and are up to 3Gb. Total file sizes are around 60Gb before consolidation starts. We left it running for 8 hours (yes EIGHT hours). Total file sizes were more than 100Gb, and the damn thing had still not finished.

Life is simply too short. The consolidation idea is a fine one. Maybe it works really well for some people. A simple deletion option should however be made available. Delete the whole previous backup set and its increments. It would take about 10 seconds and give us exactly what we need

 

If you just run full backups to Backup Locations, ATI can mange the number of files according to how you set up the Backup Location, and consolidation doesn't enter into it. In many cases, it ends up being a faster way to go. The only real advantage of INcs is saving time doing a backup -- but if consolidation is required, poof-- there goes the time savings.

 

Hello all,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup software

I would like to inform you that our Development Team have fixed some issues in Backup Location management and we are going to release the new build of Acronis True Image 11 Home very soon.

Thank you.

--
Michael Levchenko

 

Thanks for letting us know there are going to be some more bug fixes It will be really nice when we can finally just let Acronis manage our backup locations.

Using full backups was something we considered, however disk space is just too tight. 14 Backups, 2 full with the rest as incs only take 60Gb. Having the same level of robustness with full backups would take 280Gb

Fingers crossed for the update.