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Scheduled backups and Disck Cleanup - can they be made to work?

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Win 7 64 - Acronis build 6613

I am having great difficulty in getting Acronis to reliably handle scheduled backups. 

I have two large external drives which I backup to manually but my scheduled backup is simply for day to day work in progress folders and I like to have that performed every 2 hours.  Since is only a small number of folders for that, I am backing up to a 16GB SD card.

After some help from this forum on sheduled backups, I have now set the incremental sheduled back-up to do an automatic clean-up which I thought was meant to clear old backups.  This time when the SD card filled up, Acronic prompted me that it was paused.  Opening Acronis showed the backup to be running but I could not stop it.  The only way to stop it was to reboot my machine.

Now I am back to a suggested method that I found on this forum of having to make a clone, delete the original scheme, and the rename back to the original scheme and start again.

So my question is, is there any way to automate scheduled backup reliably without constant manual interventions and work arounds?

I am finding all the bugs pretty annoying and it does not inspire much confidence in Acronis should I ever require the software to preform properly during a disaster recovery. 

When I use the term Acronis in negative manner, I refer solely to the business, not the moderators of this forum who do a sterling job.

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Cameron, 

Automatic Cleanup and scheduled backups can work successfully, but it really depends on having sufficient free space to store the backups that are involved.

You say you are backing up a small number of work in progress folders every 2 hours to your 16GB SD card, but what you have not told us is what the size of this data is and what automatic cleanup scheme you have chosen to use?

Making some assumptions here about the missing information:

Using the Automatic Cleanup rule to 'Store no more than 1 recent version chain'

Acronis would create 1 Full backup plus X Incremental backups = 1 version chain.  However, nothing gets deleted until the next version chain has been successfully created with the next Full backup.

Your backup drive would need to have sufficient capacity to store at least 2 x Full backups plus X Incremental backups.

If you use the Automatic Cleanup rule to Delete version chains older than 7 days, then the age count does not begin until the next version chain has been successfully created with the next Full backup.  So again, nothing is deleted until 7 days after the second Full backup was created.

Hi Steve,

Each increment would only be quite small, mostly web development code and the occasional image (small images for web) so each increment would never exceed 200MB.  In fact, usually the are only about 1.5MB. The only time I would have something larger is on th occasional weekend if I get the time to work on some music in which case a new project might involve audio samples and get up to 500MB.

Given that most increments are small, I had the notification for low disk space set at 300MB.  While I did get a notification, as stated in my last post, I could not stop the scheduled backup that was in process. 

I did not have the Delete Version chains set, rather I had Store no more than 5 recent version chains.  Originally I thought that the full version size was around 1.3GB so I thought this would be safe.  I now notice by looking at the backup tib file sizes, that although the first full is 1.3GB, subsequent fulls are 3.4GB so this is probably where my problem is. 

However, even though I may have had poorly configured setup, it does not explain why Acronis does not handle stopping a backup in progress when disk space is low.

Since I posted with the problem, I had reduced the 'Store no more than x recent chains' to 3 and increased the low disk space notification to 500MB thinking that would only be 3 x 3.4GB.  However, from what you are saying, then I will have 4 x 3.4GB full versions. Is that correct?

The other problem with Acronis that annoys me is that running any backup sets my Windows Restore Point disk usage to 100%.  This has been causing me problems for quite a while and I only discovered that it was Acronis causing this accidentally on these forums.  Any idea if this can be fixed?

 

 

Cameron, if you are storing no more than 3 recent version chains, where your full backup is 3.4GB, then you need room for 4 x 3.4GB because automatic cleanup doesn't run to remove the oldest version chain until the 4th full backup has been created successfully.

For the System Protection disk usage issue, please see post: 122666: Acronis changing "max usage" slider in system restore where this issue has been reported by other users, albeit for ATIH 2016 originally, but I have seen posts for this on 2017 too.  I would recommend submitting feedback for this from the ATIH GUI along with an Acronis System Report and reference to this forum topic.

Thanks Steve, while 3 full versions plus the original should leave me with a couple of gig to spare, I might reduce it to 2 just to be safe.

With regard to the other forum topic, I have laready commented on it over a week ago so I am not sure what would be achieved by spending more time on it.  It looks like the outcome of the topic is for users to contact Acronis support and they extended warranties for this purpose however since I am on ATI 2015 Build 6613, then I am not covered by that.