Daily backups to multiple external USB drives

I currently have only two external USB2 drives (80 and 160GB) - my intention is to add 2+ more (200+GB) in a rotation. These may go off-site. However I'd like to also have immediate on-site from the prior day. My online storage is around 100GB. Estimated changes are 5-10GB per day.

I want to do daily incremental or differential backups using TI to an external USB drive. I also want to be able to take a drive off-site as needed.

Would it be best to do physical copies of the on-line TI backups periodically? Or is there another way to make sure that each off-site copy contains all of the files necessary to do a restore to that point-in-time?

 

Hello rpwt,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response.

Please note that using Acronis True Image you are able to cerate scheduled tasks. Just make sure that the storage device (for example your external USB drive) is connected before the scheduled task started. However, please note that drive letters may change if you connect the exteranal drives in a different order and, therefore, the image archive will saved to another drives. Additional information can be found in the Acronis True Image User Guide.

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.
--
Aleksandr Isakov

 

You start by doing a FULL backup, let's call this A.
You then can do incremental backups tied to the FULL backup A, let's call these An.

You can then choose to restore to any of the points in time represented by each of the A or An.

Ditto, starting with a FULL backup, call this B.
Ditto for any other backups you wish to maintain.

Each set of backup files is totally independent of each other set of backup files.

Just make sure that you backup ALL files for each backup set.

 

Howard, thanks for your suggestion which should be usable for my purposes. However, would it also be possible to do physically copy the FULL backup A to another disk (call it C) and then have TI do an incremental/differential of my online disk using the C full image (Cn)? I think it would be faster to physically copy the full image than to essentially run a full TI backup twice in succession.

 

Hello rpwt,

We are very sorry for the delay with the response.

Please be aware that both disk\partition and file-based backups are ordinary files and therefore can be copied\moved between the hard drives, partitions and folders using any file manager. However, when you create an incremental backup you should point to the full backup to append incremental changes to. The resulting incremental backup will be saved to the same folder the initial full backup resides in and should stay there in order to be "restorable". In other words, the whole set consisting of the initial full along with a number of subsequent incremental backups should be located in one folder. Please read section 3.2 and Chapter 5 of Acronis True Image 9.0 User's Guide for further details.

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