Deleting backup files each month

I have set up a 40gb external hard drive ("F") as a supplemental backup of my "C" drive, which has only about 25 gb of files on it. To ensure that I will have sufficient space on the "F" drive , at the start of each month I erase the accumulated files( not those in the Secure zone), do a full backup, and set Acronis to do an incremental backup every other day.

The first time I did this, I got a "system not available" or some such error, which I finally solved by deleting and reinstalling the Acronis program.

Although this didn't take long, is there a way of deleting last month's backups without having to reinstall the program?

If the backup disk gets full, will incremental backups fail, or will Acronis automatically delete the oldest incremental backup?

Assuming I have suffficient disk capacity, could I save the backups in uncompressed mode, so they could be accessed off the "F" drive directly, vs. having to mount a virtual "G" drive?

Thanks in advance.

 

Hello michael_in_atlanta,

Thank you for using Acronis True Image (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/).

We are sorry for the inconviniences.

You may do the following (if you haven't yet):
- Schedule full back up creation monthly;
- Schedule incremental back up creation daily;
In this case each month the full back up will be replaced with the newly created one.

When you explore an image you need to mount it and assign a letter independently of the compression level.

As for the error you encounter please contact support@acronis.com with the description of it and the screenshot with the error message.

Thank you.

--
Ilya Toytman

 

If the old full backup is deleted prior to creating a new one, do incrementals also get deleted once the new full backup is created? (they should since they are no longer incremental to the orginal backup).

Thanks,
Kurt

 

Yes they do in the secure zone.

 

How do you manually delete an image in the SZ without deleting the SZ itself .

Notwithstanding, if not imaging to the SZ, the answer to Kurt's specific question is that they don't. The old incrementals are left hanging around as useless orphans. However, provided the new full image is named the same as the previous one, the orphans will get overwritten one by one with each subsequent new incremental.

Regards

 

How to delete selected backups in the SZ

I found this thread while I was looking for an answer to the following problem and I thought my topic is pretty close:

I use SZ to manually backup my system partition. First did a full backup (lets call it BUP1a) and after that only increments (BUP1b, BUP1c, BUP1d ...) . Now the SZ is almost full. I would like to leave the original BUP1a and start an new backup-series BUP2a, BUP2b, BUP2c etc. Thus I can always switch back to my first Backup. But because of limited space I don't care about keeping the intermediate (incremental) backups of the first series (BUP1b, c, d ...).

Can this be achived?

Today I gave it a try and although TI reported only 8 GB left in the SZ I startet a new *full* backup which I expected to be approx 5 GB. After finishing with no errors, in the list of existing backups all former backups were still listed. So, no overwritten backups so far. Well, that|s what I thought but then I saw that TI still reported 8 GB to be free in the SZ (which should be about 3 GB according to my math)!

So what went wrong?

And how can I delete the old incremental backups of the first series, which I dont need any more?

Thanks in advance...
...Ralf

 

Re: How to delete selected backups in the SZ

I guess I found the answer myself, right here in this forum.

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=427765&postcount=2

Sorry I did bother you.

But one thing still is unexplained:

 

Menorcaman

I was referring to SZ where incrementals do get deleted automatically. I wasn't saying you can delete them manually. The idea of SZ is that TI can do the housekeeping for you.

 

Hi pjb024,

Thanks for the clarification. I understand how the SZ manages images, it's just that none of the posts prior to yours mentioned imaging to the SZ.

Regards

 

Why doesn't TI do housekeeping on NON-secure zone backups??

I want to make

A) TI backups to a "master BU" disk - holding at least 2 full BU's and incrementals all the time.

B) Have 2 external USB disks that get "cloned" from the master BU (using XXcopy, syncing directories) - only 1 USB disk is connected a each time, the other disk is kept off-site for safety - these get swapped weekly

The "weekly full-daily-incremental" routine works nicely, but I *hate* the orphaned incrementals, it's not easy for our (computer-challenged) clients to visually "see" what the latest BU is.

Is it so hard to delete the incrementals when overwriting a main BU, acronis??

 

Nothing a little BAT/CMD file can not manage for you, if you know when the full backups are started.

5 minutes before True Image begins on the full backup, start a CMD-file that creates/modifies a dummy file on the "master BU" disk. This is your lower-water marker.

When the backup is over, create a list of image-files sorted by modification date (newest first). Any image file that is above the "low-water" marker is sacred and is kept. Anything that is below the "low-water" marks gets deleted.

Any incrementals you add will be above the "low-water" mark. Only when the next full backup is made, is the low-water mark modified and moves up the list before the the incrementals and the (old) full backup.

For two full backups, you either need to keep the backups in separate directories, or you need to modify the mark/cleanup-script to handle two low-water marks and only delete files below the oldest mark.

 

@Minimax,

I was thinking batch files to do this, but was going in a different direction (renaming sets of BU directories) - this didn't work out for me, as syncing renamed dirs to other disks would take too long.

Your marker system is something I hadn't thought of! I'm looking into it right now, fantastic idea, thanks a million.

 

Tonio, I have dusted of a script I wrote for Experts-Exchange some time ago. It is now a bit more flexible and should be easily adapted for use with True Image.

You can get it here. If you run the script without arguments, it will display a brief usage instruction:

Code:

Usage: delete-by-timestamp [/T timestamp-file] [/U] directory extension

  /T     Name of local timestamp-file. Default is "Timestamp.log".
  /U     Update the timestamp file after scanning the directory.

delete-by-timestamp will delete files in directory 'directory' that is older
than a magic timestamp-file (also in 'directory').

Example:

  delete-by-timestamp /u "C:\Temp" .png
  14-05-2005 15:28:57,44 - deleted 37 .png files in "C:\Temp".

will delete all PNG-files in "C:\Temp" that is older than the file
"C:\Temp\Timestamp.log".  After the files have been deleted, the
timestamp file will be updated with the current date and time, and
with information on how many files that was deleted.

As always, be really careful with scripts like this that goes around deleting files. If you like, you can change the script, and edit the section that reads:

Code:

:delete
        set /a delcount=delcount + 1
        del "%~1"
        goto :EOF

to read:

Code:

:delete
        set /a delcount=delcount + 1
        echo del "%~1"
        goto :EOF

to see what it would have done to your files.

 

Nice work.

Always great to see these kinds of batch files!

I'll be using this, but Acronis really should extend the backup management beyond the Secure Zone only.