All of the Images

I have been doing a backup each day and now find that I have a lot of backup image files building up on my drive.
Can I delete the earlier files and keep only the last one or two

 

Heard you the first time.

 

Hello sam2539,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Actually, it depends on the type of your backups.

- If you have only the full images then you can delete any of them leaving only the needed ones.

- If you have a set of backups consisting of the initial full and a number of subsequent incremental backups then you can delete them starting from the end of this "chain" only. The point is that each new incremental backup is based on the initial full and all previously created incremental backups. If you delete at least one incremental backup from the middle of this "chain" then all subsequently created incrementals will be of no use as you will not be able to restore them.

- If you have a set of backups consisting of the initial full and a number of subsequent differential backups then you can delete any of these differential backups as each new differential backup is based on the initial full backup only.

You can find more information on what full, incremental and differential backups are in section 3.2 of Acronis True Image 9.0 Home User's Guide.

Please also note that you can limit the amount of images created by Acronis True Image in four different ways:

- Use Backup Server feature (available in Acronis True Image 9.1 Workstation and Acronis True Image 9.1 Enterprise Server for Windows only, details can be found in section 3.5 of the corresponding User's Guides);

- Use Acronis Secure Zone (see section 3.3 of Acronis True Image 9.0 Home User's Guide for further details);

- Use batch file (script) which deletes or renames images as a pre\post-backup command (see section 5.3.3 of the above mentioned User's Guide);

In the pre\post commands fields of the backup archive creation options you can specify commands or batch files to be automatically executed before and after the backup procedure. You can use any commands supported by Windows command line interface or enter a path to the batch file written in terms of standard Windows scripting rules (see this Microsoft Knowledge Base Article for details).

Please also take a look at this previous post of mine providing the example of a batch file automatically renaming backups in accordance with the current date.

- Schedule several pairs of tasks so that several sets of images covering several last weeks\months will be created (see these previous threads for details: Can TI9 control the number of backup sets?, differential back up Q's).

If you have any further questions concerning Acronis software, please feel free to submit a request for technical support or post any of them on this forum. We will certainly try to help you in resolving any issues.

Thank you.
--
Alexey Popov

 

I always take a full backup of my system partition and data partition.
I have several .tib-files of each partition especially of my system partition to create different situations for testing.
If I don't need another .tib-file I use the same name of the last .tib-file and that one will be overwritten. ATI will warn you but I ignore that message.
I don't want to delete those .tib-files, too much work and I'm lazy.
In the end you have to delete them anyway, overwriting is much easier.