consolidating incremental backups

Pete, welcome to these User Forums.

There has been no actual consolidation for as long as I can remember across many different ATI versions.

ATI 2018 (and other versions) all give you what you say you want, i.e. "a full backup then incremental changes to files" but not the final part of what you ask, to consolidate all these files into one large backup file.

If you create an Incremental backup scheme with ATI 2018, then you will get multiple files to hold this information (no different to earlier versions), and each individual file is represented on the Recovery page in the backup versions drop-down list which shows those files by the date/time that they were created.

If you are still unhappy with the way ATI works / is designed, then use the Feedback tool in the GUI to tell them what you would like it to work like, or raise a Support Case with them for this.

Thanks for the quick reply Steve.  I've already submitted a coupla tickets on this issue.  As of yet, no reply.

Hello Pete,

I've added your feedback to the existing feature request, however should also confirm that the current software architecture doesn't allow to perform manual cleanup or consolidation of backup archives. The older backups can be removed using Automatic cleanup rules. 

ATI *definitely* used to have the consolidation option way back. Having just come back to ATI after many years of absence, today I've been searching for where the consolidation tool lives and... it's gone! I thought I simply wasn't looking in the right place, but now I see this thread. Damn! Very, very disappointed with this.

At some point Acronis must have taken the decision to remove consolidation - I can't understand why you would do this!

Paul, welcome to these User Forums.

ATI has not provided consolidation for a long time although the backup task logs will still show this word in the text, but this now refers to automatic cleanup which is used to manage your older backup version chains.

In ATI2017, at least, you couldn't consolidate the files; but you could blow away all of the incremental files manually. Then you could do a "dummy" restore from the remaining full. ATI would complain about each missing file, but eventually it would straighten itself out.

I don't recommend doing that, though, since I have no way of knowing how reliable it is and it's a pain in the neck. What I've been doing is create one task that creates a full backup every thirty days, and another task that creates incrementals but only saves a few chains. That way I have a full backup from several months ago and incremental backups for the last couple of months.

There was a function in an old ATI (2015 maybe?) that supposedly consolidated backups.  I don't remember if it was actually called "Consolidate".  The only time I tried it I cancelled the run after many hours - more than a day if I recall correctly - so I don't know if it actually did what I think of consolidation.  I assume the intended result would have been a "full" backup done at the time of the last incr or diff backup.  Deleting old backup chains certainly reclaims space but really isn't a replacement for consolidation.  

using 2018 Backing up my not full 500g ssd. Just filled a 4tb usb drive with the "default" differential backup settings. I remember being able to consolidate backups in an older version to solve this problem. My quick solution is to wipe the drive and start over, this time using a much shorter cleanup cycle!

I vote for bringing back the consolidation feature.

btw: 2014 had several tools that were removed in 2015. then complaints made acronis start to add back some of those tools in the next 3 versions. Reminds me of new coke vs old coke?

Acronis: can you add the tools that you removed from 2014 as a separate download for those of us who actually know how to use your software? This would allow you to keep the sleek version for newbies, but give us IT some power tools. Thanks

Jay, I would recommend that you either submit Feedback via the tool provided in the ATI GUI, or that you raise a Support Case to make you request to Acronis known about any missing / removed features.  This is just a User Forum and whilst we see occasional Acronis people come visit, there is no guarantee that they read each and every topic / post written here.

I have a question as to how 'consolidation' would work.  Would the consolidated file be the same as a full backup performed at the date/time of the last incremental backup?  Or would the incremental files be 'appended' to the full file so the user would still be able to go back and recover an accidentally deleted or overwritten file.  Or perform a restore from an earlier date. Essentially, retain the drop down list that Steve shows above:

https://forum.acronis.com/comment/431257#comment-431257

I have to correct my previous message - the manual clean-up feature is planned to be returned in the upcoming version of Acronis True Image, however this won't include clean-up of individual dependent backups.

I had the same request. But here is what I did to save the disk space of all those incremental backups (but it doesn't make an Acronis file). I didn't need to make an actual Acronis file but I'll bet you can just backup the folder and you will have, almost, what you want. Here is what I did:

1. I mounted the last incremental backup
2. I used copy/paste into a folder

EddyQ wrote:

I had the same request. But here is what I did to save the disk space of all those incremental backups (but it doesn't make an Acronis file). I didn't need to make an actual Acronis file but I'll bet you can just backup the folder and you will have, almost, what you want. Here is what I did:

1. I mounted the last incremental backup
2. I used copy/paste into a folder

Thank you, Eddy, added your feedback as a vote to the feature request.

I am still using ATI 2014. It has the consolidate function. The reason I haven't upgraded is because all versions I considered after this lacked features such as Backup Cleanup, Consolidation, plus other issues. I am glad to see Backup Cleanup return. Although it is much more limited in function. For example, in ATI 2014 you can delete ANY particular Incremental version. In ATI 2019 if you select an incremental version, all later incremental versions are deleted also.

The consolidate feature is very needed if you want to just that, to consolidate a backup chain that you want to archive. Especially if you can no longer create a new full backup, such as when the original system is no longer available.

So, Acronis, Bring back the Consolidate feature! And you will have another return customer.

For example, in ATI 2014 you can delete ANY particular Incremental version. In ATI 2019 if you select an incremental version, all later incremental versions are deleted also.

John, if you delete an incremental version for which later incremental files exist, then those later files are unusable because the deleted file renders them so.  This is why ATI 2019 takes that action to delete all later incremental files - they are no longer viable to use.

I never used the consolidate feature of ATI 2014 or earlier versions, so cannot comment with confidence on how it worked, but my understanding is that all it did was to consolidate just the incremental files not the original full backup image, so you had a shorter chain.  Acronis dropped that feature because of issues with its reliability and replaced it with automatic cleanup.

See KB 48620: Acronis True Image 2015: Consolidation Is Not Supported

I tried using the old consolidate feature twice, but each time I cancelled after it ran for many hours.  I have no idea how well it worked.

Improved cleanup features helped reduce space used by backups, but that was not the only use of the consolidate feature.  I have wished for this feature when I wanted to save old backup chains. 

If you have extra an extra disk drive there is an obvious alternative to the consolidate feature.  Do a recovery to the spare drive; then create a new backup of it.   That's a lengthy process, but it's probably faster than the old consolidate.

JohnEd wrote:

So, Acronis, Bring back the Consolidate feature! And you will have another return customer.

Hi John, I've added your feedback to the existing feature request, thank you! However, I should say that chances to get this feature back are very slight, as Patrick mentioned it was really resource-consuming and not always reliable. 

2019 at least brought back the ability to cleanup backup versions manually in the GUI. Not the same, I know, but something of a middle ground.

I also test and use  a couple other backup products that do consolidate automatically and have never been confident in them as they also run into database issues at times. 

Just me, but I have more confidence in backup chains with a good retention and cleanup plan. Having anaiccasional new full helps renew backup integrity and provide options for recovery in the event that something goes wrong in an incremental plans chain.

When a product consolidates bad data in a backup, well, it's still bad data tucked away. Perhaps rare, but not impossible. That's the nature of disk failure which can lead to bad data in backups.

Instead, with a few weeks of separate version chains, there are at least some options which might allow to recover from a point in time  before a corruption scenario occured. 

Definitely points for pros and cons and can see why consolidation can be useful in situations. I'll take reliable backups with backup retention and cleanup (scheduled and user initiated) over possibly buggy consolidated backups for my own use though.

The only time that I think that the ability to consolidate backup files is perhaps needed is when these are from a computer which is no longer available and you want to have a single complete backup image file instead of having a long chain of incremental files, but even that can be achieved by recovering the chain to a spare disk drive then creating a new full backup from that drive.

Otherwise, ditto to Rob, I will stick with keeping incremental chains short and making new full backups at a regular intervals to consolidate the status at those points in time.

Otherwise, ditto to Rob, I will stick with keeping incremental chains short and making new full backups at a regular intervals to consolidate the status at those points in time.

 

Good point from all of you. Thanks for commenting to me.

Be careful. I selected an option to delete old backups. I was keeping my backups sorted by category and date in various folders. I though that by delete old backups, it meant that after making some number of incremental backups it would create a new full backup and delete the old ones. Especially I didn't think it would search all folders but it did and I have now lost all of my saved backups.

EddyQ how did you delete the backups? The automatica cleanup and version chain retention timeline is an option in the backup task. If you select backups manually for deletion and tell it to delete, it will delete them.

Doing so in the GUI would not delete all backups though, just those associated with the backup task you tell it to.

If you select backups from file explorer and delete a file or multiple backup files, they all delete, just like any other file using Windows explorer.

Acronis does not just magically delete all backups though. But if you tell it to delete a backup job completely, it will do exactly that.

Thanks to all in this thread. At least now I understand what's going on.  I left Acronis for another backup tool about 4 years ago, in part because (as others have said) the old consolidate would start but never finish.  Yesterday I was excited to see what appeared to be a new and better version of that tool, and bought 3 licenses.

Now I see that the feature is not what I thought.  I'll get by since I just upgraded to a much larger NAS where I will keep my backups.  Just for the record, here is what I thought a good, practical version of the tool could do.

Say you have Full backup A and incrementals B, C, and D.  Combining them all into a new single file which contains the equivalent of restoring from D would be slow and take a lot of space during the process.  What I hoped for was to merge just B, C, and D into a new E.  Then by keeping A and E, nothing would be lost except the ability to go back to intermediate dates.  Since B, C, D are often dominated by the same frequently-changed files, this would save space.  This example shows just two files saved, but with a longer chain a lot of space could be saved.

I'm fairly happy with 2019, aside from the fact that my first backup plan was creating a full backup every time.  I never found out what was wrong, but (after some intermediate tests) ended up making a new one with (I think) identical settings and it works fine.  It's a big deal, since a full backup takes over 4 hours, and an incremental under 5 minutes.

Bobbo_3C0X1: I did not delete any of the backups via Acronis nor Explorer. They just disappeared and I think it was due to the fact that I selected to delete old backups. The problem was that I thought it would delete them just from the folder where the incremental backups were but it searched through all of the folders and deleted all of the old backups.

Before deleting files, ATI should explicitly list the files that it is going to delete, and then ask, "Are you sure?"

Peter, welcome to these public User Forums.

ATI 2019 & later has introduced a new option for each backup task to 'Clean up versions' and this allows much easier handling of removing unwanted backup files, whilst also managing the information that ATI stores about files in its internal database.

The downside to having ATI having to ask the user 'Are you sure?' is that this would halt the 'automatic cleanup' function while waiting on the user to answer the prompt, which in turn would prevent any further queued backup tasks from running etc.

Just as an aside, both Macrium Reflect (I have the home edition) and Easeus Todo (Enterprise Edition) have the ability to consolidate incremental backups after a certain number (user defined) of incremental backups are performed. I believe it is called "Full Synthetic" backup in Macrium. Macrium Reflect treats the Full Synthetic Backup as a virtual drive for purposes of recovering files.

Information only, no reply is necessary.

Thanks,

Bill Byrnes

I solved the problem of a missing consolidation option via conversion to vhd. This is a little tedious and time consuming, but works. You also need a disk with enough space.

Convert your old backup to vhd. You can choose the date of any incremental backup. Then mount the vhd and back it up using ATI just like a new Backup. You end up with the version of your choice in a single compressed backup file.