Scheduling: Force full backup to occur on specific day (independent of incr. backups)?
I'm using TIH 2011 to backup user files daily. My goal is to run a FULL backup every Saturday night, and incremental backups Mon-Fri night. Because the backup set is large (and takes a while), I would like the full backup to always occur on Sat, regardless of the number of backups run during the week.
Currently I've set it up do a Full backup after every 5 incrementals, and scheduled it to run Mon-Sat, which isnt exactly what I want. With this method, the date on which the Full backup occurs depends on which day I start the task. Furthermore, if I manually run a backup mid-week, the whole scheme is thrown off.
Is there way to force True Image Home to always run a Full backup on a specific day (Sat) and have the differentials run on other days (Mon-Fri)?
Secondly, is there a way to force a full backup midway through the backup scheme (say i want to manually run a full backup on Thurs before a major upgrade)?
Thanks!
As Pat L has indicated, your goal could be achieved using Chain2Gen (C2G) which is a helper program for TrueImageHome (TIH). C2G was written by forum contributor MVP Oracledba
TrueImage runs the tasks which does the scheduling and creates the backups, whereas, C2G provides the controls on when the full backup should be created. or how many to be retained. C2G offers many choices.
TIH would run the task daily and C2G would make sure that full backups are created on any specific day of the week. Number of backups would not be an issue.
As for the special full backup on Thursday (for example), you would need to do a couple extra steps. This extra step could be somewhat automated. You would need to execute the C2G program
!_FORCE_NEW_CHAIN.bat
and this would clear/move the current chain backup contents of the storage folder into the next archive folder.
TIH would find the folder empty and would create a new full starting a new chain. So the Thursday full backup would begin a new chain and have the full and Fridays backups before another new chain would be created by the normal full Saturday backup.
C2G methodology is to have each chain in its own folder and C2G controls how many folders/chains to keep based on the user selected parameters.
Any time you would want a special full backup to occur on a day different than your Normal Saturday, this could be achieved by running the bat file mentioned above before instructing TIH to create a new backup. This bat file could also be part of a bat or cmd file which could be run from the desktop manually.
If interested, click on my signature index below and look at index item #5. Some additional guides are listed there. The parameter file is not difficult to set up and you should give it a test. As the first step, be sure you check the zip file (before unzipping) "file properties" to see if the file needs to be unblocked--as listed in the guide or help file.
The C2G file was written for 2009 and 2010 versions but continues to work with the current versions. C2G has not been changed or been updated and its use is "as is". I have used it for a couple years now and it does what it says.
It looks like this will work, though it's a shame this functionality isn't integrated into TIH itself. It seems it's about 90% of the way there.
I'll give it a shot tonight.
I've used Chain2Gen for several years and I know it's great! It would accomplish allowing me to "force" a new Full backup on a particular day, BUT what about the feature of ATIH 2011 called "Acronis Recovery".
Wouldn't moving the backup sets to folders different than where Acronis created them cause "Acronis Recovery" feature to fail?
That's the new tab in Windows Explorer that lets you find a previous version (backup) of a file.
It's surprising (disappointing) that Acronis, through all of these "upgrades" (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 and even 2013) never thought to look at Chain2Gen for some "Inspiration". THAT is what ATIH needs to be bigger and better.
Thanks,
David
Wouldn't moving the backup sets to folders different than where Acronis created them cause "Acronis Recovery" feature to fail?
That's the new tab in Windows Explorer that lets you find a previous version (backup) of a file.
David
The moving the files would cause TI to create a new files on next backup creation.
Because of the move, if the files were needed for a restoration, user would use the "Browse for Backup" feature and use the option to add to backup list; or right click on the file from inside explorer and choose the Recover option.
The files are still valid and while TrueImage does not know where the files are, once located by user, they can be restored without difficulty.