Consolidate many incrementals?

Hello.

I intend to schedule daily incrementals of a system drive. Let's say I've got 1 Full backup and 100 incrementals. Now, I want to free some of the disk space, but I know that the snapshot represented by Incremental #62 is an important one I want to keep.

How can I consolidate the original Full image, plus incrementals 1-62 into a single Full image representing the state when incremental #62 was made? Alternatively, what about just collapsing incrementals 1-62 into a single differential based off the original Full image?

As I write this, it occurs to me that perhaps I could mount incremental #62 read-only as a drive letter, then use Acronis to do a Full image of it! Given what I've seen of mounted images, the perfomance of this would likely be dismal, if it is even possible. I'm not sure how reliable this method would be, either.

Thanks for any advice on this matter!
Soundman

 

Just to follow up... I did a quick test, and found that TI9 cannot make an image of drive that is, itself, a mounted image, so that idea won't work for consolidating incrementals.

Is there any way to do it?

 

With a spare drive you could put it in place of you present drive, boot from the rescue CD and restore 62nd image to it. This would give you a copy of your computer at that point in time. Then swap your drives back again and keep your "special drive" until you decide it can be put to some other use. Of course while your spare driver is still installed it could be imaged to a separate backup location for long term storage. I particularly like restoring to a spare drive because it puts nothing at risk and is the ultimate way to test the effectiveness of backups. I find it invaluable when checking out new versions or builds of TI.

 

How about using differential backups instead to save some space? Only the full backup and the last differential backup is needed. You can then remove all old differential images to save space.

 

You could create a current Full, restore to #62, create a Full from the restored #62 state (to keep) and finally restore the current Full to bring the disk back to present.


Edit. Just a few days ago a poster had some questions about monthly scheduling. I commented that 30 interdependent incremental files seemed many to me ...

You should bear in mind that every validating procedure checks the whole chain. So, the n-th incremental will be fast to create, but slow to validate. And if one of the incremental files goes corrupt, you will have quite a job to find out which one it is (so as to determine up to which date the image is usable).

 

Hello Soundman,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please note that you will not be able to consolidate several incremental backups in one with Acronis True Image 9.0 Home. However, please note that the analog of this feature presents in Acronis True Image 9.1 Workstation and Acronis True Image 9.1 Enterprise Server. With this products you will be able to combine the first full backup with the next incremental one into one full backup which will dated the later backup date. Then, if necessary, this backup will be combined with the next, until the occupied storage space (or number of backups) decreases to the limitation. Thus, the archive integrity will not be affected, in spite of the fact that the most old backups will be deleted. This procedure is called automatic consolidation. This can be done with the image archives stored in Acronis Backup Server. You can find more information about this feature in the respective User's Guide.

Thank you.
--
Aleksandr Isakov