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Assistance setting up a scheme for Monthly Full Backup each month with Daily Incrementals

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I have been using TI for many years and a long time ago their support suggested creating a Pre-Backup .BAT file containing a line similar to:

IF "%DATE:~7,2%"=="01" ( DEL B:\Backups\Gateway10\*.tib )

This script deleted all .tib files on the first of the month, just prior to the incremental backup beginning.

After upgrading to TI 2016, I'm getting an error stating:

Information: The specified file does not exist.
Details: Click Retry to try to read from the same location.
  To create a new version according to the current backup scheme, click Ignore

Without human intervention, the job hangs and fails.

Thanks for any assistance or thoughts.

--Tom

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Tom, welcome to these user forums.

One of the issues with deleting your backup .TIB files using the batch command file is that the newer versions of ATIH from 2015 upwards use an SQL Database to keep track of the backups and will throw an error if any are missing.

Acronis no longer recommend manually deleting backup files or doing so outside of the Acronis application, even via a batch file in a Pre-Command.

The recommended method is to use the automatic cleanup rules that are available on the Backup Scheme page tab in ATIH 2016.

Note: If you are running an incremental backup and delete all backup files before this runs, then it will always create a new Full backup file as having any missing incremental files in a version chain will break that chain - each incremental file is dependent on the previous incremental right the way back to the full backup file.

In the automatic cleanup rules, you can select to either Delete version chains older than X days, or to Keep only X recent version chains.

Further note: a version chain is an initial full backup along with any further incremental (or differential) backups that have the same _b?_  backup version number in the file name, i.e. system_full_b1_s1_v1 plus system_inc_b1_s2_v1 plus system_inc_b1_s3_v1 etc.

If you do manually delete any of the backup .TIB files for your Acronis tasks, then you should run a Validate for that task in order to reconcile the Acronis database with the status of the backup files remaining.  To Validate - select the task name, then click on (V) to the right and select from the drop down menu.

Hi Steve,

Thanks for the quick response. This makes total sense, if they've gone to a database model to manage backups. I'm going to give the "non-stop" backup option a try, since this is an opportunity to jump out of my comfort zone. If I'm not happy with it, I'll try the incremental with a 28-day cycle, not quite the monthly I've been used to but pretty close.

I purchased TI2016 a while back, but just got around to installing it. In your opinion, for just general/routine backups (nothing special or essentially critical), is there any compelling reason to upgrade to the newest 2017 version?

Thanks.

Tom, there are a number of enhancements with the 2017 version, but for me the key one is the change to support from just 30 days (from date of purchase) to a whole year of support with 2017.

Other than that, there is better support for NAS devices and enhanced Cloud services but there are also a few bugs around in the current build version of 2017, so if you are comfortable with 2016, may be worth waiting a little longer.  You may get nagged a little to advertise that 2017 is available but easy to ignore!