Scheduled incremental backups

I've just moved from Acronis True Image to Paragon Hard Disk Manager and can't figure out how to schedule backups like I did with True Image. I want to schedule a full backup on a weekly basis, and then incremental backups every day for the remainder of the week. When the week is over I want to schedule another full backup, and then incremental backups based on that new full backup. All I can figure out thus far is how to schedule an incremental backup against a full backup that's already taken place. That's not what I want to do since it will take intervention on my part.

True Image had the capability to schedule an incremental backup, and if there was no pre-existing full backup, it'd do a full backup the first time and incremental backups after that. How do I accomplish that using Paragon software? I really appreciate your advice!

 

Hello Wtreid,

You need two separate jobs to complete that.

First schedule a weekly full backup and uncheck "Generate unique names for scheduled backups".

Then schedule a differential backup with the base image above. Every week, a new base image will overwrite the existing image, and differential will create new differential backups based on the new base image.

 

I am confused. I understand scheduling a weekly full backup etc..
Am I correct that you have to wait for the above backup to happen and then while in the Differential Backup Wizard you select the above backup and schedule the differential for the same time?

 

That's interesting you brought up the scheduling aspect of Paragon Drive Backup. I was just about to convert from Acronis to Paragon when I ran into the same situation. Today I have a full backup every Sunday, followed by differentials on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I also have the retention set to maintain three full copies with differentials at any given time. In Drive Backup I was unable to setup the Full with the differentials repeating every week and I could not determine how to automatically purge the archives older than three weeks. I hate to say it, but at this point Acronis Scheduler has Paragon beat and that's where I'm going to stay.

PS: I was also hoping for more data incryption options, then just a Password.

 

I'm frankly stunned that someone would recommend overwriting a base image like that. If that system fails during that process, you have no valid backups. Anywhere. This is really a fundamental flaw in the product.

I can't see any viable option that doesn't involve writing a script (powershell, perl, whatever) to periodically copy off and then delete backup sets or a script to periodically edit the backup script to change the archive name or target directory. Neither is anything but a nasty kludge, but would overcome the product limitations.

The best option is to use backup software that's designed for periodic cycles instead of one shots.

 

Hi Guys,

Please have a look at the following document:
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=212991&d=1255648260

This has step by step instructions for creating 2 rotating differential backup sets. This is as close as I could come to creating an automated backup routine that updates your base images, without getting down to a scripting level. This also eliminates the serious concern that your system might fail during the base overwrite and leave you with no backup at all as winds350 pointed out.

If don't mind going into the script, you could use a command to run a bat file that renames the previous backup, then waits for the new one to succeed before deleting the previous one. Make sure you put the delete command after the last call check errors to ensure the previous backup isn't deleted if the new backup fails.

Run file from inside Paragon script (place above the //backup line):
exec file "C:\rename.bat"

Delete file from inside Paragon script (you'll need one command for each file in the archive folder (make sure you disable image splitting!) or simply call on another bat file to do the deletes):
filedelete ("C:\mybackup\mybackup.pbf")

I agree that we need to respond and match the scheduling options that Acronis has for retention and consolidation. I will do what I can to encourage our developers to look into this.