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Best settings for large drive backups?

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I need my 9TB Raid drive to be backed up to a 12TB RAID drive twice a day. 

Attached is a screenshot of the current setup which is not working since the backup gets full too frequently.

What are the settings I need to make sure Acronis deletes old backups so that the backup drive doesn't get full?

 

 

 

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2016-10-28_10_57_14-.png 128.76 KB
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Image Studios, welcome to these user forums.

How much of your 9TB RAID drive is actually used and what type of objects make up the bulk of the content of the drive?

If your source drive is over 50% used and you are storing objects which already employ a large amount of compression such as images, video etc, then I suspect that your 12TB RAID target backup drive will not be large enough for any of the ATIH backup schemes.

Acronis will only delete old backups after the next full backup has been created, so your backup drive needs to be able to store a minimum of 2 full backups.

An Acronis version chain comprises of an initial Full backup plus all Incremental or Differential backup files that carry the same Backup version identifier, i.e. in a file name such as MyBackup_full_b1_s1_v1 the backup version identifier is _b1_  thus any additional incremental / differential files for the same chain will all have _b1_ in the file name.

In your screen image provided, you would have files with the names:
_full_b1_s1_v1 followed by _inc_b1_s2_v1 to _inc_b1_s8_v1  

This version chain will not be deleted until after the _full_b2_s1_v1 file has been successfully created.

You will need to calculate the actual sizes that such files as those above are to know what can be stored on your backup drive.

The 9TB drive is used for editing videos. Most of which is 4K RAW files.

The drive uses about 8TB of data all the time.

Is it not possible to use Acronis to keep this data backed up unless I have a location that is twice the  size of my 9TB drive?

While you won't be able to use the main backup capabilities of ATIH 2016 for your video data, you could consider using the Synchronisation feature instead but this will require that you have an Acronis Cloud subscription.

Please see the ATIH 2016 User Guide: Synchronizing data which will provide more details of this aspect of the application.  My understanding of Sync is that you must create a 'Default sync' to the Acronis Cloud, but can be of a small folder that doesn't change very much, then create a second sync for a local sync location, as I suspect that you wouldn't necessarily want to sync the whole 8TB of videos to the Cloud.

Alternatively, there are a number of synchronisation programs available that you can use.  The key caveat with using synchronisation is to be careful if doing this automatically especially if mirroring changes from source to target - if you accidently delete files on the source or they are encrypted by malware etc... !

In reply to by truwrikodrorow…

I have a similar situation. I am backing up files to a desktop 3TB drive. My back up file size is 1.4TB.
The process fails (out of space) when I try adding a second full backup (.I ordered a 4TB HD which should solve the problem).
.
How best should I set up the backup scheme. I am not concerned about earlier versions since I need
only the last one that mirrors the most recent configuration.
I only backup after there has been changes.(2 times a week).

My scheme is -  Incremental - Create full version after 8 incremental versions - Store no more than 8 recent versions.
Question - Does the new 2nd full backup take as much time as making the first one?

Thanks Gene 
 

Gene, welcome to these User Forums.

If you are configuring to "Store no more than 8 recent version chains" and your full backup size is 1.4TB plus the size of 8 incremental backup files, then you would need a backup drive of around 14TB.

A version chain = 1 x Full plus 8 x Incremental files, so 1.4TB plus the size of 8 incremental files.

Automatic cleanup does not run until a new Full backup is successfully created to take the count of recent version chains up to 9 (in your example), at which point the oldest version chain would be deleted.  So in reality you need to be able to hold 8 + 1 Full backups at a minimum.

For a 3TB backup drive, you should configure to "Store no more than 1 recent version chains" and hope that your 3TB can actually hold 2 x 1.4TB files plus 8 x Incremental files.

The time to create any Full backup file will always be much longer than that to create incremental files.