Confused about differential backup procedure

I have two equally sized physical hard drives, one of which has the sole purpose of backing up the other. I have created a full backup and set a scheduled task for a differential backup.

The files currently existing are:
Storage.tib -- full backup
Storage2.tib -- diff backup #1
Storage3.tib -- diff backup #2
Storage4.tib -- diff backup #3

1) I don't actually want to save all of these older deprecated backups since only the full backup and latest differential backup are necessary to do a restore. However I'm not sure how to set it up on a schedule so that it automatically deletes the previous differential backup after creating the latest one.

2) Should I just delete Storage2 and Storage3 manually and rename Storage4 to Storage2, and repeat this process manually after every backup? The only way that I know what's what is by the ordering of the files and the size of the files (Storage.tib is obviously the largest, and then they have increasing sizes). I also will need to have the full backup on a longer-period automatic schedule, and if it continues with this trend of naming all the backups the same way, how will I be able to keep track of what's what, especially when I have to be manually deleting and renaming them?

 

Hello junglebeast,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response.

1. You can set our program to automatically consolidate the backups from chain onto full one. Please keep in mind that full information about automatic consolidation is available in 5.3.7 chapter of User's Guide, which can be downloaded here.

2. Yes, you could act in this way if you want to manage backups manually - simply delete previous backups and proceed with the backups creation (renaming is not necessary).

Thank you.
--
Alexander Nikolsky

 

Thanks for your reply.

I didn't explain my confusion very well...

It's not practical to just make 1 full backup and then use differential backups from then on, because the differentials will keep getting larger.

What I need is for a full backup to be made every week, and differential backups of the latest full backup to be made every day. How can I set this up, so that both types of backups are happening automatically?

Or is that not possible?

 

Hello junglebeast,

Thank you for your interesting in Acronis True Image

In order to achieve the desired result you should use two schedule tasks. One for full backup and one for your differential backups.

Best regards,
--
Dmitry Nikolaev