Acronis True Image Home 2009: Missing BackupLocation Support

Discussion in 'Acronis True Image Product Line' started by rgubler, Oct 18, 2008.

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  1. rgubler

    rgubler Registered Member

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    Hi,

    i updated from TI Home 11 to Home 2009. Now I'm missing the settings and support for he backup-locations. Meaning: e.g. do a fullbackup, 10 diff-backups, restart with a new fullbackup, ... if 600GB full delete oldest backup.


    Yours Ruediger
     
  2. shieber

    shieber Registered Member

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    For this version, Acronis moved the backup limits from Backup Locations to the Tasks. You set Automatic Consolidation when creating a task. This handles autodeletion for tasks involving incs/diffs only. You no longer get to automanage a series of Full backups. Backup Locations are a thing fo the past with ATI 12/2009. Some folks are cheering, some of us have rejected ATI12/2009.
     
  3. sootsnoot

    sootsnoot Registered Member

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    I'm not sure if this answers a question I was about to ask: under TI 11, and most any sensible backup program with incremental backups, you can schedule the interval or count of incrementals made against a full before the next full backup is made. I don't see how to do that in this version. It doesn't appear to be implied by consolidation. I've only just installed it, but from going through the menus and reading documentation, it seems that you can either:
    schedule an incremental, and it will create a full the first time, and then do incrementals from that forever​
    or
    schedule a full, and it will do fulls forever​

    Is there really no way to schedule weekly or monthly fulls with daily incrementals, or am I just not understanding the screens/documentation?
     
  4. rgubler

    rgubler Registered Member

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    It would be nice to have monthly fulls with weekly diffs and daily incremental.
    But it looks like Acronis is going a step backward - or better: they want do improve a function (consolidation settings for every task is nice) but they forgot to think the whole way.


    Rüdiger
     
  5. Mem

    Mem Registered Member

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    One possible way:
    Setup a task for full backup as Week1.tib then have another task for incrementals on that full backup to be run every two weeks. The next week setup another full backup task - week2 - for every two weeks and an incremental task for the week2 file. You now have two weeks of backups at any time.

    Include a couple of tasks for a monthly full, say monthly1 and monthly15, to be run on the 1st and 15th and those will overwrite the old fulls each month.

    That would be 6 tasks in total.
     
    Last edited: Oct 18, 2008
  6. shieber

    shieber Registered Member

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    Note that for each Full task, you get to keep one and only one Full. You want more Fulls? Write more tasks. Why should the program do the rote mundane work when a human that paid for the program can do it? ;)


     
  7. sootsnoot

    sootsnoot Registered Member

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    That sure does sound absurd. Maybe the idea is that the new consolidation stuff is really great - both that it's fast, and that consolidating a full with n incrementals results in a full with 1 incremental that is identical to what you would have gotten if you made a full instead of the (n -1)th incremental, and then made one incremental off of that.

    I guess that would be kind of consistent with what appears to be the default of just 2 backups if you enable consolidation based on number of backups: in that case, each backup of live data gets done in the time it takes to do an incremental, and then there's a bunch of post-processing of just the backup data. If the consolidation stuff really works well, then maybe you could get an effect similar to, say, daily incrementals with monthly full, by setting the consolidation threshold at 30, and then running a separate Windows scheduled task to run every 30 days and copy the full and its 30 incrementals to a different area. You'd still have daily granularity for as long as you want it and have space for it...

    Does that make sense? Anybody know if the consolidation stuff is really that good? Certainly the TI 11 handling of quota violations (or the way that Norton Ghost 10 tried to deal with running out of space) was not something you'd want to have happen very often.
     
  8. EddieA

    EddieA Registered Member

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    Unless I got something wrong, when I tried something similar, it didn't work.

    The full backup, took a full backup. Great. But, the incremental, thought it didn't have a full to "work off", so, started by taking a full backup on the 1st day.

    I need to experiment more, but this new method of "consolidation" seems a step in the wrong direction.

    Cheers,
    Eddie
     
  9. Mem

    Mem Registered Member

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    Once the full backup task has run you will have a file called (as an example) weekly1. Now make the incremental task to run every two weeks using the weekly1 file name for the incremental tib file. The incrementals will then be made and saved as weekly12, weekly13, etc. The second week set would have weekly2, weekly22, weekly23, etc.
     
  10. EddieA

    EddieA Registered Member

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    Except, when it comes time to re-use Weekly1, how do you tell the Incrementals to go back, and start with Weekly12.

    They don't, they just keep going after the last one. So, assuming you do 6 Incrementals, after Weekly1, the first time they will be called Weekly12 -> Weekly17. After the next Weekly1 full backup, the next incremental will be Weekly18, then Weekly19, etc.

    Cheers.
     
  11. Mem

    Mem Registered Member

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    Not on mine they don't - they replace the incrementals but the old incrementals remain until overwritten or manually deleted. I just look at the creation dates and that tells me if they were part of the last set. Your two incremental tasks may not be set up correctly.
     
  12. EddieA

    EddieA Registered Member

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    I'm not quite sure I get that part. Can you explain.

    I'm also not sure how else I can set the Incrementals up. It's set for the same Source as the Full, and the Target is "Add to existing", which points at the Full.

    Cheers,
    Eddie
     
  13. sootsnoot

    sootsnoot Registered Member

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    Even if the combination of naming and scheduling can be worked out to produce backups that have the property of daily incrementals from a weekly base, that can go on "forever" without filling the destination by virtue of consolidation, there's still an issue. Most users do WAY more backups than they do recoveries or mounts of images - if you're lucky, you may never do either one except for your initial testing to verify that it's possible.

    With traditional (TI 11) style incrementals on a fixed schedule, and a full every n incrementals, the time of your longest backup is the time it takes to do a full backup. When your destination starts to run out of space, you can delete (or move elsewhere) the oldest full and its sequence of incrementals. With the TI 2009 scheme of avoiding destination overflow through consolidation, the time of your longest backup seems to be highly variable, and definitely longer than the time of a full backup.

    In my case, I do backups to a network share hosted by an XP Home system where the physical disks are external in Firewire-800 enclosures. This has proved very reliable for ordinary backups using either Ghost 9 or 10, and TI 11. But the consolidation done by TI 2009 seems to thrash the destination disk so heavily that it takes FAR longer than a full backup. And the chances of getting a network timeout or "Delayed Write Failure" during the process are very high. So I have solved the problem by uninstalling TI 2009 and reinstalling TI 11.

    There's nothing I can see in the new features of TI 2009 that offset the loss of scheduling functionality from TI 11, since as far as I can tell the end result to me is a loss in reliability of my backup jobs. I want to be able to set a simple daily schedule and forget it, at most deleting some old stuff now and then. I don't want to worry about the performance impact of having a consolidation running most of the day, and then encountering some errors that require verifying the backup, and possibly corrupting the destination disk.
     
  14. bodgy

    bodgy Registered Member

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    If you keep to the old method of having a set of week1 and week2 tasks consisting of a FULL and Incrementals, you will find TI will **** it's nose at you and do its own thing. With no consolidation set you will end up with.

    week1 - Full
    week11 - inc 1
    week12 - inc 2
    week13 - inc 3

    etc;

    Week 2 as above but using

    week2 - week 2 full.

    Interesting is what happens when you get back to the Week 1 task you will get;

    Week4 - week1 full
    week41 - week1 inc
    week42 - week1 inc
    week43 - week1 inc

    etc.

    The originals will not be overwritten, but you will get weekly historicals for ever! Now this new system is actually GOOD if you have backup requirements that require you to restore a machine to any instant in a particular deignated period - so banks and large organisations may well use a method like this, using tape drives or banks of swappable backup drives and then delete a years info at a time - not so good if you have just one backup drive of limited size.

    All Acronis need to do here is make this either an option, or have it in their Echo versions only.

    If you have consolidation ticked for number of images, then TI seems to get closer to a week1, week2 system.

    Colin

    I wonder why I've been censored for using the word thumb?
     
    Last edited: Nov 4, 2008
  15. sootsnoot

    sootsnoot Registered Member

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    Yes, Colin, if consolidation really worked well (i.e. was fast and reliable), then if I understand it correctly you could, for example, maintain a week's worth of backups with daily granularity, continuously and indefinitely, without ever running out of space, by setting a quota of 7 backups. The first 7 backups, you'd get a full followed by 6 incrementals, 7 days total.

    On the eighth backup, it would consolidate the full with the first day's incremental to produce a new full, and then do an incremental from the 7th day's incremental, again resulting in 7 days total. If the full produced by consolidation was the same size as an ordinary full, and if it was reliable and efficient to produce it (i.e. not taking far longer than an ordinary full, and not likely to cause network timeouts or disk corruption), then it would probably be quite workable. You'd be in a steady state maintaining 7 days worth of backups without ever increasing the disk space used beyond what would be needed for a single full plus 6 incrementals.

    If the performance and reliability of that steady state were acceptable, then perhaps that would be good enough.

    Alternatively, I guess you could write a script to run at the end of each incremental. That script would do nothing when it was invoked the first six times, and then on the seventh time it would move the full and its six incrementals to a different directory (possibly renaming them at the same time); that script could also manage the total amount of space used by old week-long backup sequences outside of the Acronis quota system. So then the 8th time the incremental ran, it would not find a full; so it would create a new full. The end result would essentially be the same as using TI 11 with a daily incremental and weekly full, except that:
    • You have to write a script to preserve a week's worth of backups and trigger a new full.
    • Your script has to worry about naming conventions and managing the space in the place to where it moves the week-long sequences.

    If only Acronis documented something like this as an example of how to use script invocation options to simulate the scheduling options built-in to TI 11, it might help a lot.

    But unfortunately, from my testing with a network share with an external disk behind it, I really can't rely on consolidation. And I don't see why I would want to cook up a script to trigger weekly fulls in TI 2009 - that just opens the door for me to screw up my backups - when it comes built-in to TI 11.
     
  16. WarwickT

    WarwickT Registered Member

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    I note that the issue of scheduling a base plus n incrementals then a new base etc. has been raised in a number of threads. (That option was available in TI 11 but has been removed in TI 2009 - a backward step).

    I have been in direct communication with Acronis support on another matter and at the same time asked about restoring the option to set up such schedules and have been assured that they are working on and "it will be fixed soon". (I am hopeful but not holding my breath!)

    I also asked about using scripts to move/rename/delete images as part of a strategy to achieve the same result. The advice in reply was that you should not do that because moving/renaming/deleting outside TI will mess up the metadata database (there are references to this in the TI 2009 manual).

    WarwickT
     
  17. shieber

    shieber Registered Member

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    That's right, in 12/2009, Acronis moved the backup limit rules from the tib location to the task but also cemented the info about the backups in a database instead of just reading it from the disk.

    So if you move or delete any tib files, then ATI12/2009 can get wonky thinking things are unchanged. Don't worry, if they do fix up this pooch-abuse, you can bet you can pay for it when the "fix" comes out in a new version next year. ;) I wouldn't expect a major revision to the design in an Acronis program to be released in a free build update.
     
  18. EddieA

    EddieA Registered Member

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    Hey bodgy, I still can't get this to work.

    If I declare the Incremental as Create New Backup, using the same name as the Full, the 1st time it runs, it overwrites the Full, with another Full backup.

    If I declare it as Add To Existing, and point it at the Full, then I get the actions I described above. It works correctly the 1st time the Full is used, but when the Full "recycles", the Incrementals just keep adding. None get removed. This is what I get, abbreviated to a 2 week cycle:

    Week1 (Full)
    Week12 (Incremental)
    through
    Week16 (Incremental)

    Week2 (Full)
    Week21 (Incremental)
    though
    Week26 (Incremental)

    Week1 (Full) - Overwrites previous Week1
    Week17 (Incremental)
    Week18 (Incremental)
    etc.

    Files Week12 through Week16 are still present in the backup location.

    Cheers.
     
  19. bodgy

    bodgy Registered Member

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    You need to set the consolidation parameters. However, this will still leave the incrementals, but they will get overwritten.

    Another way of doing this, which will still leave the incrementals, but will definitely overwrite the set is using 1-Click.


    Colin
     
  20. EddieA

    EddieA Registered Member

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    I'm not sure I'd trust that. Doesn't it work by rolling the "oldest" incremental into the preceding full, before deleting the incremental.

    I'm not sure what would happen when the incremental is older than the full.

    Cheers,
    Eddie
     
  21. sootsnoot

    sootsnoot Registered Member

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    There may be a better thread for this, but I haven't found it by searching and reading FAQs...

    For me, the dropping of useful scheduling features makes TI 2009 a non starter. I've told friends at work that they should consider buying TI 11 on their own nickel to avoid re-install hassles if their PC dies - but that was based on experience with TI 11.

    Is it possible either to purchase TI 11, or to buy 2009 and apply the license key to a saved download of TI 11?

    A pointer to a better place to ask would also be appreciated - the acronis site didn't look any more promising for that, and I'm sure they'd rather have people running 2009, though the best way to make that happen would be to make it work at least as well as 11.0...
     
  22. Acronis Support

    Acronis Support Acronis Support Staff

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    Hello all,

    Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

    Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response.

    Please be informed that starting from build 4946 in Acronis True Image Home 2009 we included feature which allows you to create Full backup after N differential\incremental backups. When the first backup on a schedule is executed, a full backup will be created, the next backups will be
    incremental (or differential) until the specified number of incremental (differential) backups
    is reached.

    Please refer to 5.3.4 chapter of User's Guide.

    Thank you.
    --
    Alexander Nikolsky
     
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