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Several questions about backup versions

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Suppose I have a backup set that is a full drive image. It contains 1 full backup version followed by 5 incremental backup versions.

Questions:

  • Can I collapse backup versions 1 thru 3 into a single backup? Thus baking in the 2 incremental changes into backup version 1? So I'd have backup versions 1,4,5 ? (I'm guessing not as incremental 4 and 5 needed the full backup 1)
  • Can I delete certain backups versions, say 4 thru 5 because I will never need them and they are taking up space. Maybe delete the backup files directly? Would that break anything?

Thanks.

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John...there is no ability to merge versions.  If you want to recover a file from version 5, you would need all of the files...1 through 5.  If you were to delete 4 & 5, you could recover files from 1, 2, or 3, but would get error messages that ATI can't find versions 4 & 5.  You would have to "Ignore" the error messages.  

Personally, I would never delete files within a backup chain.  You can delete entire backups that you don't need, but you should do that from within True Image.

If you delete incremental in a chain, you need to delete all of them, or all of them from a particular incremental. For one of my backups (data partition) I regularly delete all but the full backups, then do a validation. Unfortunately the clean up rules do not allow you to specify that all full backups are to be retained, only the first one.

Ian