Incremental Filling Up Drive

I have searched some but was wondering if there are any new developements or best practices for preventing my incremental backups from filling up my drive and causing my backups to fail.

This is one area that Storagecraft seems to do better. That would let you define how many backup sets to keep. I am looking for something similar with Acronis.

Your help is appreciated.

 

Sure you can do that. I'm not sure if it's working correcftly in ATI 11 but it worked in ATI 10. Just define a Backup Location and set limits by file number, size, age or all three. Create a Task to backup to the Backup Location and specify Incremental and how many incs before a full is done.

 

In what exacr screen do you setup how many incrementals to do?

 

This example may help. Go to the this link and give the suggestion a try. https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=101231

 

But that just seems like a workaround. From shieber's post, he makes it sound like there is a way to just define the number of incramentals to keep before a new full backup is made. That is what I would like to see.

Thanks.

 

Below is a download of a text file on "backup locations" written by Catsfan432. Download and follow the instructions except change the number of incrementals to 6 if you want one weeks worth.
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=189433&d=1177754188

There are alsoseveral references to "backup locations" in the sticky below.

 

Wow. So, it looks like there is no real solution from Acronis on this one. This is what I was talking about in my original post. With Storagecraft's product, I can just tell it how many incramentals to perform before starting from scratch.

All of this feels sort of hacked together but I'll give it a shot.

Thanks.

 

You can tell ATI you want, for example six incs (or iffs) before it does the next full. It's in the manual. After you create the Backup Locatin you create a task to use the Backup Location as tha target direcftory. If you create a task to back to a BAckup Location, then it will offer you choices on how many incs/diffs before ATIO creates another full.

Once Backup Location limits are reached, ATI consolidates a full/inc/diff set into one file and if consolidation doesn't acheive the required limits that oldest files are deleted.

This works with ATI 10. ATI 11 is another question. It has bugs with automated tasks and inc/diff backups. Otoh, Storagecraft has its own set of probs.

 

I just want to make sure I am clear. In ATI 11 this function is broken, correct? I only have 11 I never had 10, I can set the number of backups for my monthly full back up, but I can not set it for my incrementals. Just wanted to make sure what I am seeing is correct in ATI 11.

Thanks

 

Works fine for me - backup location rule set to maximum of 15 files, chose full backup after 6 differentials, I therefore get a full backup every week, and differentials in between, and files get deleted after they are two weeks old.

 

On some hardware set-ups ATI11t is not functioning correctly. It probably works fine on most set-ups. You can't get this kind of automation with the other backup progs, so I think it's worth trying, if you understand now how to set up ATI to manage incs/diffs. Once it's set up and working, you can pretty much forget about it. Ihave ATI running automatic on nearly a dozen pcs comprising over a half dozen diff hardware set-ups. ATI10 works on all of them and 11 works on some.

 

Where do you choose the options to allow you to have a full backup after 6 differentials? I am working in TI v11?

Also, is there any option like this in TI Workstation edition? I can't find anything.

 

Also, if I wanted to rotate two drives how would I set that up?

What I want to do is keep one drive plugged in for a week, then, take that one offsite and plug in a new one. Then, switch them again in a week.

So, I would like it to do a full image the first time after it is hooked back up and then do differential backups the rest of the week until it is detached.

Thanks

 

I hope to do something very similar as your scheme, except I'll be cycling through 3 external USB drives.

I have plugged each USB drive in one at a time and gave them all a drive leter assignment of "J". Note that I didn't use a lower letter like "F". This is because you might insert a thumb drive when your USB HD is NOT installed. That thumb drive could be auto-assigned drive letter "F". If that happened, the scheduled task would try to put the TI image on that thumb drive by mistake.

The drive letter can be assigned in XP using right-click on the My Computer desktop icon, then Manage, then Storage>Disk Management, then right-click on the USB HD and select ChangeDriveLetters&Paths.

On each drive, I've created the identical backup location name to receive the backups. This way the same sheduled task can keep running and it will work for all three USB HDs without any other consideration than plugging any of the drives in and being sure Windows remembers to assign it drive letter "J".

So, I have one task to do incremental backups to drive "F" and I swap out the USB HD when the backup size reaches the size quota (which is not limited to only one week).

When I bring back a USB HD that has previously reached its size quota, I will erase the TIB files and keep the backup quota file (".cfg"). I think TI will then automatically re-create a full backup and continue from there with incrementals.

I wanted a method to retain file versions for over a month if possible.

Suggestion: Because incremental backups were not consolidating properly on my external USB HDrives when they were formatted as FAT32, I reformatted them to NTFS and then consolidation worked as it should.

 

What do you mean that the backups were not consolodating properly? I'll probably go with NTFS either way but I was wondering exactly what was happening.

Thanks.

 

You have to follow the user's guide. you have to create a Backup Location and then use a backup location for the target when you create the backup task. It will then offer you the option to set the number of once/diffs before the next full. It's in there, it sounds like you just haven't found it.

 

After following the proper procedures for creating a backup location, I found that TI10 did not know how to properly consolidate (manage) the many 4GB "split" backup files that were created during the initial full backup when using a FAT32 file system. I knew it wasn't working because errors were generated during consolidation and it never completed the process.

Using NTFS resolved that issue. There are no "split" full backups when using NTFS. Each incremental backup creates a new single file, though. So you will have one full backup file and several incremental files.

When I reach the max size quota, I'll swap out that external hard drive with one of the other hard drives that has an older backup on it and then erase that backup. The task will recreate a new backup on that drive at the scheduled time.

Also, before beginning a fresh backup, it's a good time to consider defragging your internal hard drive.

See the following link for more details (including the error report) about consolidation on my FAT32 external USB drives:
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=193871​

 

Thanks for this critical tip.

I had two tasks, one full and one incremental ... but backing up C to D.

So I defined a 'backup location' for D. Then edited my tasks and had them use 'the D backup location' instead of D ... the trick was finding the Backup Locations in the explorer view, instead of the D drive itself.

Then I deleted the backups I had, then schedule the FULL to go tomorrow at 1am and set the INCREMENTALS to run daily at 4am ... and redo the FULL every 7 days.

I also liked that using the backup location, you don't need to provide a name for the backup. What name(s) does it use?

Thx,
Scott

 

For this specific example, wouldn't you then need to also change the number of maximum backups to 9 (ie increase it in the example by the same amount) for the consolidation to work?