How can I delete old backups in the ATI GUI?

Djard,

Your screenshot shows you have almost 300GB of backups.  Are these backups of your C: drive or are they of C: drive and other drives as well?

What do you mean when you say the 2018 manual steps are not consistent with your interface?  It certainly is min my case and I have never seen any other user say that.

Looking at your screenshot it appears that your backups are in the 90GB total size range.  You are saving these to a location that has 298GB of space.  So this would allow for a total of 3 backups before your designated backup loction is full.  Does that sound like what has happened?  I think you are probably using the default backup option of Entre PC when you setup the backup task.  Are you aware that choosing that option will include all installed disks in the backup and may include your backup location disk as well?

Answers to these question should get you some direction in which to proceed.

Yes, you have assessed my situation accurately.

I have seen posts of Acronis v2018 that show a file manager type of GUI for managing backups, which include files sizes, location, etc. As you can see in my OP, I have nothing that remotely appears serviceable. So if I want to select a specific backup and restore my primary partition (drive C:), or delete an old backup, I have no means to do so. I navigated through all the links in the interface and found nothing that appears what is shown in the online tutorials.

Maybe I have a defective copy?

Looking at your screenshot, the middle column where your backup task (P6T) shows, look to the right of that and you will notice an small v shape.  Click on that to produce a menu from which you will see an Open location option.  Selecting that show the available backups in an Explorer window.  If all your backups are Full scheme backups you can delete old ones.  If they are Incremental scheme then deleting one will break the chain and make all other incrementals unusable.

Thanks for responding.

I also clicked on "Clone Settings" in the drop-down menu to make sure that in the future, only full copies are saved, which, oddly replicated the "This Computer" entry (See attached). So if I can lean on you for more support, I ask two questions:

1. Looking at the attached image of what appears in Win Explorer, how can I determine which files are "Full" and which are incrementals?

2. Can I delete the duplicated entries in "This Computer" column? without erasing my backups?

Cloning the task settings only does as shown in your screen image, i.e. creates a copy of the task being cloned and prefixes the task name with (1) or (2) according to how many times you do the clone.

Your File Explorer image shows that you are creating both Full and Incremental backup files for your P6T task, this is shown in the file names shown, i.e. P6T_full_b1_s1_v1 = Full backup, and P6T_inc_b1_s2_v1 = the 1st Incremental backup based on the b1 Full backup file.

From the files shown, your backup scheme looks to be to create a new Full backup after creating 3 Incremental backup files (s2, s3, s4) hence P6T_full_b2 was created after P6T_inc_b1_s4_v1 as a new backup version chain was started.

You can remove the unwanted cloned tasks (with (1) & (2) prefix) by taking the Delete option for these.  Your file listing does not show any (1) P6T or (2) P6T backup files for these tasks, so it looks like you have never run those tasks.

Looking at the backup files on my external USB drive, I see now that I do have a scheme of creating a full backup after three incremental ones. I forgot that I have my file manager sort files by names and not dates. Thank you all for responding and your kind patience.

I read somewhere that deleting old backup files with a third part file manager, like Windows Explorer, would erase metadata and possibly make backups unrecoverable; but I see nothing in the User Guide about safely deleting old files.

I selected Tools -> DriveCleanser -> my storage drive (F:\) -> Next. But I got: "Warning! You have selected the active partition." I thought drive C:\ is my active partition.

So how do I delete old backup files to make room for new ones?

In the Open Location screen you can click/select a backup file and delete it but first you must turn off Active Protection because the Self Defense mechanism for it will prevent backup file deletion.

Djard wrote: " I selected Tools -> DriveCleanser -> my storage drive (F:\) -> Next. But I got: "Warning! You have selected the active partition." "

Do not try to use DriveCleanser to delete your unwanted .TIB files - this is intended to wipe whole disk drives for security purposes and you will lose everything on the drive.  If your storage drive F: is a separate partition on your main OS drive, then you risk wiping the OS drive in full!

I disabled protection against ransomware and manually deleted a number of files and folders on my external USB drive where I save ATI backups. Unfortunately many folders, like Microsoft Shared, Internet Explorer and a myriad of backed up system folders refuse to be deleted. And Win 7 does not allow "TrustedInstaller" to alter permissions ("Full control" box grayed). So I still have a load of OS data on my external USB drive.

I want to keep only the first full backup but don't believe it will work if I save it in another location, in the event I need to format the backup drive as a means of deleting old  backed up system files.
 
Is there anything else I can try to free up space on the drive? 

AAP only protects Acronis .TIB files and the ATI program folders and data, it has nothing to do with your " Microsoft Shared, Internet Explorer and a myriad of backed up system folders " if these were created by a different application and not contained within an Acronis .tib file.

There should be no problem with moving your first full backup .tib file to another drive and then reformatting the backup drive to recover all of its space, then moving the full backup .tib file back to the same folder location where you had it previously.

Any full disk recovery using the backup .tib file should always be performed by using the Acronis Rescue Media to boot the computer from, at which point the standalone ATI application doesn't care where the file was originally written to, only that it is available and can be used for the recovery operation.

If you have indeed moved the Windows folders shown in your screenshot to your external F: drive then you have a problem.  You would need to move ALL Windows System folders and files back to your C: drive which of course will make room on F: drive for backups.  If you do not do this and instead format your F: drive despite warnings then Windows will stop working.

Having just looked again at the original screen shot showing drive F: it almost looks as if Windows was installed to that drive letter?  If that is the case, then this is a much bigger issue as Enchantech has indicated and it may be impossible to move Windows to the correct C: drive without doing a new install of Windows.

After much research and labor, I was unable to figure how a copy of my primary partition was saved as an expanded backup on my external USB drive; nor was I able to figure out how the metadata for the backups was lost, which previously made it possible for me to use the Acronis GUI to delete old backups. Learning to turn off protection for deleting unwanted files in my file manager was helpful. Thanks.

So I formatted my backup drive and cloned my HDD as a *.tib file, which individual files I discovered are accessible for copy. I thought it was possible to set Acronis where the original backup is saved but subsequent backups are replaced after the size limit of the backup drive is reached. Since the latter is apparently not possible, I disabled auto backups altogether, which might be a good idea anyway; for if a system file became corrupted or infected, the program would automatically create a backup of a problematic OS. Am I mistaken?

Djard wrote: " if a system file became corrupted or infected, the program would automatically create a backup of a problematic OS. Am I mistaken? "

You are not mistaken, any backup application which runs by schedule has the possibility of capturing system problems as well as enabling the recovery from the same.  A lot depends very much on user vigilence, i.e. how quickly the user recognises that something is wrong and that a recovery action is needed to resolve this.

The same issue would apply to any automatic backup process where storage space has finite limits and thus older backup versions of files will be deleted or overwritten in time as space needs to be freed to allow for the latest backup files.

Thanks for the clarification. I really like the way you explain these issues. I am grateful.