How to make a full backup manually
There is something that's been bothering me for years, literally.
I would like to make backups manually, whenever I connect my external drives and I feel like doing backups.
I've set Acronis to make differential backups, and just in case, full backups after 15 differential ones.
My question is very simple: How do I make a full backup after less than 15 differential ones, say after 8?
So far, I've tried two approaches:
1) Set the maximum number of differential backups to less than, in this case, 8 and then run it manually.
2) Like 1), but let it run as scheduled task by setting it to the next minute.
It also seemed that, at least in older versions, Acronis never makes full backups if you run it manually. That explains approach #2.
Any suggestions as to what I could try?
A sidenote: Acronis True Image would be about 3 times as much worth if it had just two buttons: "Full Backup" and "Small Backup". Should be extremely simple to implement and would make it the perfect backup solution for powerusers.
Reto,
You cannot force ATI to do a full-backup whenever, except with this trick: you can move your existing manual files to another directory on the same disk (to avoid a long copy). The next time the backup runs, it will start over with a new full.
You can automate this trick with the Chain2Gen tool, or by writing your own script.
Thanks for the replies and please apologize for the huge delay (email notifications are now on..).
bin, I may have forgotten that my two approaches don't work, probably due to b ugs (of which I have found countless anyway). That's way I was looking for alternatives.
Pat, the Chain2Gen tool seems just what I need, at least the idea. I didn't dare to tamper with the actual files so far, because every time I did something slightly out of the ordinary, ATI freaked out and I had to redo my backup task, which only takes a couple of hours...
But Chain2Gen is overkill, because I do all the backups manually anyway. So I can just move the old files to a new folder manually when wanting a new full backup (and I've actually done this before, though didn't entirely trust it).
Now, I wanted to test everything and set up two folders with some arbitrary files (just about 50MB in total). I then configured an incremental file backup for them and started modifying the folder contents and making backups.
However, once, when I moved a whole generation to a subfolder, Acronis would NOTICE and continue the backup there. But it mostly doesn't do it.
I don't get it. What is going on?
EDIT: Never mind, Acronis recognized the backup in the subfolder somehow and added it to its backup list which I failed to notice. So eventually, I clicked on the wrong backup task. Problem solved ;)