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Why does Acronis remove a whole chain of backups when auto clean-up is enabled

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Hi everyone

I currently have the following backup scheme

  • Incremental
  • Create a full backup after 4 incremental backups
  • Don't save more than one backup chain

Now what I was expecting Acronis to do is this.

  1. Create full backup #1
    1. Create incremental backup #1.1
    2. Create incremental backup #1.2
    3. Create incremental backup #1.3
    4. Create incremental backup #1.4
  2. Create full backup #2
    1. Remove incremental backup #1.1 // Create incremental backup #2.1
    2. Remove incremental backup #1.2 // Create incremental backup #2.2
    3. Remove incremental backup #1.3 // Create incremental backup #2.3
    4. Remove full backup #1 and incremental backup #1.4 // Create incremental backup #2.4

However, prior to creating full backup #2, Acronis removes the whole backup chain #1, leaving me with just one backup left.

Is there a way to achieve my desired scheme? Am I using the wrong backup method here? Should I switch to differential to achieve this?

Thanks for any help.

 

0 Users found this helpful

Marius, welcome to these user forums.

What you are reporting and seeing with regard to automatic cleanup is the way the program is designed to work.

Automatic cleanup works only with complete version chains, and you cannot have an incomplete incremental version chain in the way that you are expecting for this to work.

Every incremental backup is dependent on the previous backup file, either a previous incremental or the inital full backup of the chain.  As soon as you would remove incremental 1 of a chain, then any further incrementals, i.e. 2,3,4 etc are rendered invalid and useless.

With your automatic cleanup settings to 'Store no more than 1 recent version chain' - the cleanup rules will remove the completed version chain as soon as the next full backup of a new version chain has been successfully created, thus you are satisfying the rule - you still only have 1 version chain.

 

Hi Steve

Thanks for your detailed explanation. Definitely cleared things up.

But then it could work with the differential backup method, right? Since those backups only rely on the previous full backup, removing them one by one should leave the chain intact, correct?

BR

Marius

Marius, you are correct about the differential backups only relying on the initial full backup of the version chain, but Acronis does not provide a cleanup rule that will allow for differentials to be removed in the way you ask, which would work provided the full backup was retained.