Need to design a multi-cycle backup schedule

I am a new user of Acronis True Image 10 and I need to setup a multi-cycle backup plan as described below.

The backup schedule I need is:
1. Weekly backup cycle:
Sunday: Full backup of all partitions
Monday-Saturday: Differential Backups of all partitions
2. Repeat the above weekly backup cycle, accumulating complete backup sets for four weeks.
3. On the 5th and subsequent weeks, repeat the same weekly backup cycle, but delete the oldest backup set to make room for the new set.

I have tried several approaches to accomplish this, but none of them work.
I have been using a similar backup plan with Norton Ghost, but it does not provide the necessary disaster recovery capabilities.

Can someone please give me a procedure that will accomplish my backup schedule?
If you need to reach me to discuss my backup plan, my email address is: johneff@hughes.net
Thanks for your help!

 

johneff,

Out of interest, which Ghost were you using and which disaster recovery capabilities was it lacking?

 

Thanks for responding.
I Am using Norton Ghost 9 which, in general works very well and is convenient to use. However, Ghost provides only Incremental Backups, Not Differential. With Incremental Backups, all incremental files need to be available to accomplish a restore. On two different occasions, when I attempted to Restore backups, at least one of the incremental files turned out not to be readable for some reason. I don't know whether Ghost had incorrectly deleted one of the files or whether it was actually corrupted. In any event, I was unable to restore the backup. With multiple backup cycles, I was always able to restore an older backup but lost data in the process. Also, the procedure for booting from a CD for disaster recovery was intermittant. Sometimes it worked OK and sometimes the system just froze up. In any event, Acronis Tru Image seems to be a better choice since differential backups are inherently more reliable and simpler to restore and I never really felt that I could safely rely on Norton Ghost in an emergency.

 

Hello johneff,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are sorry for the delayed response.

Please notice that you can accomplish your schedule using Acronis Backup Locations feature. You can set the limit on the number of backups to 28 and set to create a full backup after every 6 differential backups. To learn how to do that please see chapters 7 and 8 of Acronis True Image 10.0 Home User's Guide; chapter 3.5 contains an overview of Acronis Backup Locations feature.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov