How to schedule monthly full with the rest incrementals?

I'm using ATI V11.8101.
I'm accustomed to using Norton Ghost. In Ghost it's easy to schedule it to do a full backup on the 1st of each month and then do daily incrementals the rest of the month. That is pretty standard behavior for backup software.
But, I cannot figure out how to do this with ATI. It made a full for the first backup, and it's now just making incrementals, every day forever. This is unacceptable, as it forces me to keep the old initial full backup forever, instead of having the option to delete it to save room, after I have a made a more recent full.
On one hand I sense ATI is a strong product, but in other ways I find the way the menus are constructed to be complex and non-intuitive. They have very non-standard behavior.

Please help!

 

The Backup Location function should work very well. TrueImage Home excels as a image creating or image restore software. It takes a little time as does any imaging recovery software. There is a definite learning curve. You might want to review the sticky in the first line of my signature. Also, the guides listed in line 2 & 3 of my signature might help. You will want to store your backups on another drive. Trying to create a direct burn of a backup is problematic at best and not recommended by most of the forum regular posters.

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Check this discussion in post #13
Create and Configure Backup Locations Incremental.txt by CatFan432
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=172470#13

His instructional text file direct download is this file below.
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=189433&d=1177754188

 

You'll need separate tasks for the full and incremental backups.

For the full backup you can set it to run monthly on a specified date and time, in your case that would be the 1st of each month at whatever time you choose.

The incremental backups get stickier.

You could set it to daily but it will want to create an incremental backup on the 1st as well as all the other days. You could of course simply cancel the incremental backup when it starts on the 1st, since you'll be doing a full backup on that day.

Alternatively you could set up 30 separate incremental backup tasks, one for each day of the month from the 2nd to the 31st. These you would set as monthly on a specific day.

 

Having 30 inceimental's is risky. If one of the early ones is bad, all the newer is not usable. Every time, you validate one incremental, it will consume lots of time because it will validate the entire series of all backups.

How about a full backup weekly or bi-weekly, etc. I personally use weekly with incremental in between.

 

I offer this scheme just to demonstrate there are many ways to skin a cat. I keep 2 weeks of backups. Each week started with a full and then differentials. Each week is contained in its own folder. I use a two line batch file (in pre-commands) to delete the oldest week's files(in folder B) and to move the most recent files (in folder A)to folder B before starting to write to folder A again.

 

Monthly full with incrementals not good. Weekly full with incrementals better, much. The batch files I provided at https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=216950 you will find useful.

TGT

 

First, want to say thanks to Grover and others. I did look thru Grover's links but I don't see anything that jumps out as a "Here's how to do backup strategy of full + incrementals" manual or similar, and that is what I really specifically want to do.

Lets say I want to schedule a weekly full and the rest of the week daily incrementals. Lets say that the full(and the initial full starts Friday evening at 10pm. And lets say the incrementals are the other 6 days of the week(SAT-SUN-MON-TUE-WED-THU) at the same 10pm time.

Is there a way to set this up in Manage Tasks as a single task? Or, do I need to setup one task for the Full, and another task for the incrementals?
If I should setup as two separate tasks, should each task use the same destination folder, or separate folder? And should the backup file names(e.g. ABCDE.tib) be identical for the full and incremental tasks, or different names? I have ended up with this weird mix of daily incrementals and weekly fulls. How to tell it not to make an incremental on the same day as the full is done? And, when you select an incremental to restore, does that incremental only select the full backup that is in the same folder as itself, or does it “know” to use the most recent full, even if it is in different folder?

After using Ghost for years, I am genuinely bewildered how ATI performs and organizes this full + incremental approach. Ghost was so automatic in this basic backup regimen, yet it seems ATI goes to great lengths to avoid the topic. (also, Ghost works pretty good for me and has saved me a few times) I appreciate that ATI was designed primarily as an imaging tool, but it is also marketed as a backup solution. The very heart of backup strategy says to make a periodic full, and then incrementals or differentials to save time and disk space. I should mention that I run Ghost 14 on my laptop and ATI 11.8101

My full backup of my C: drive is almost 250GB and it copies the data across a 1GBe network to a share. This full backup takes 8 hours, is non-trivial, space-consumptive, and disruptive. It takes so long and takes up so much resources that I want to avoid running it too often.

I appreciate any and all help with this.

Thanks,

Robert

 

Correction on previous post:
meant to say
"I should mention that I run Ghost 14 on my laptop, and ATI 11.8101 on my other 2 PC's, so I daily get to interact with both apps."

Thanks!

 

It really sounds like it's time for you to rtm. Read the User Guide. Then after you think about it a little bit, it will become clear how get x number of incs before a new full is created.

The limit for number of incs isn't date or age, but only the number of incs. However, the limits a user can set for Backup Locations can be any or all of the following: file age, file number, or total file size.

You can get the User Guide here:
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/download/docs/

As pionted out above, having more than a handful of incs in any one backup set is asking for trouble in operations intended to increase security. 30 incs in a set would be like roller skating 90 miles an hour down the highway. You could be fine for miles, but just one pebble and. . .

If you can't turn over your backup sets more often than monthly (e.g., do a new full after six incs and keep no more than 8 files in the Backup Location), then consider rotating them to other media or much better, getting another disk that can hold more. hdisks have never been cheaper or larger.

 

Hello robertkjjj,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are sorry for delayed response.

As pointed by GroverH and shieber, you can use Acronis Backup Locations to set up your schedule with a single task. Please see chapters 3.5 "Acronis backup locations" and 8 "Backup location management" of Acronis True Image 11 Home User's Guide for detailed instructions on how to use Acronis Backup Locations.

Thank you.
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Marat Setdikov

 

I have been trying for weeks to find the magic combination of menus and commands and whatnot in order to get this software to work the way I need. I’ve read Grover’s manuals and I’ve also read the ATI manual for the product as well. I’m having issues that baffle me. I have created a backup location and also a single backup task that is using that location. On page 63 of the manual it is very clear that you can create a full or a incremental or differential backup and it shows that menu. It is also clear that if you set your initial backup to be incremental or differential that it will be able to tell that you have not done a full yet, and then it will do a full the first time and than incremental or differential backups afterward. As a test, I pointed it to a source drive with 8GB data on it. I set the task to be incremental backup. I set the location to be space/quota unlimited and 7 maximum backups. According to manual on page 63, “After the selected number of incremental or differential backups is made, the next time a new full backup and a set of subsequent incremental(differential) backups will be created; this process will then continue until you decide to change it.” So, I take this to mean, if you set a backup to be incremental, and you set the location to have a maximum 7 backups, then it will do this: first make a full, then make 7 incremental backups, at which point it will make a new full, erase the old full, and then start erasing older incrementals, and start making new incrementals, so that only a maximum of 7 backups will be in the backup location at any given time. Do I have it correct?
But, this is not happening. Instead, it made a full backup, and it has already made 12 incrementals, and keeps going. I set it to make a backup every hour, so that it wouldn’t take days and days to play my test out. It’s as if the maximum of 7 I set on the location , and I can still clearly see is there, is being totally ignored. On top of that, the documentation is wrong, as it never makes a new full, but just keeps the original full in place. It’s a little frustrating, because I think what I’m trying to do is a pretty basic thing: regularly, on a 7 or 14 day cycle, make a full backup, and then make regular incrementals, then start the cycle over again. And I am reading Grover’s stuff, and I am reading the manual, and the way the manual says the software work, and what I am seeing, are just completely different. My questions are, is the manual correct? Is the phrase I quote above from page 63 correct? Does it really work that way? If so, what would cause the software to ignore the maximum backups parameter I set in backup location and exceed it? What would cause the software not to make a new full backup as page 63 says? I really want to get this up and working, I feel so close, but…..I’m missing the magic bullet for this software. Oh, and although I’ve seen people offer strange scenarios, such as setting up 15 or 30 separate tasks to accomplish this, I don’t see this in the documentation, and I seriously doubt that was the intended method. I figure there has to be a straightforward way, in 1 or 2 tasks, to setup a an easy backup regimen.
Thank you.

 

Hello robertkjjj,

We are sorry for delayed response.

Actually, with the setup you described, when the limit is reached the oldest incremental backup will be consolidated with the original full backup, so there will still be 1 full and 6 incremental archives.

As for why the limit is ignored, could you please post a screenshot of the folder where you created Acronis Backup Location in Windows Explorer? Please also have a look at this post.

Thank you.
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Marat Setdikov