how to calculate space needed for consolidation and backup

Hi,

If I have a partition of a certain size, how should I go about figuring out how much space to reserve for the backup (on a separate partition and drive dedicated to holding this backup)?

My goals are:
1 - the last successful backup is never deleted until the new one is created
2 - consolidation when it grows to a certain size
3 - backup partition no bigger than needed
4 - low level of backup compression to avoid taking too long
5 - daily backup

Right now I have it set to consolidate after a max of one backups, which will not trigger consolidation until after the second has been created (if I understand correctly).

Using ATI 2009 with backup type incremental.

Questions:

1 - Does consolidating two backups into one put the first, successful backup at risk? Or is it left intact until after consolidation is complete?

2 - where are files written during the consolidation process, after completion of the second backup but before it is consolidated back into one? are these written to the backup partition, the C: drive, windows swap space, or what?

3 - with an incremental backup, i see .tib files created for the first day's full backup, and much smaller .tib files created for the follow-on incremental backups. Do these increment backups count as the second, consolidation-triggering backup?

4 - it seems that worst case would be I need to reserve 3x the size of the original source partition -- 1x to hold the first full, 1x to hold the second, consolidation-triggering backup, and 1x to hold the consolidated result as it is created, and even possibly a little more working space -- depending on how consolidation works. How does consolidation actually work?

Thanks for any help.

 

Acronis can probably give a pretty specific answer, but until that happens, I will note that my understanding is that, as a rule of thumb you should should figure at least twice the the sum of the following:

the existing backup set
the new backup

 

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