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Versioning

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I am trialling Acronis True Image and need to understand what versioning is available.  My plan is to backup to a network server rather than the cloud and need to be able to recover previous versions of files.  Is this possible or is versioning only available with the cloud service?

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Mike, welcome to these public User Forums.

Versioning to any local / network destinations is actioned by your choice of backup scheme and backup frequency.

ATI does not have a native versioning scheme that works at a file or folder level unless you are using the Acronis Cloud as a destination where you have options in the Advanced Options page to allow control over how many versions of the backup files are kept and when to remove older versions etc.

The other consideration here is how ATI works, in that it does not look at changes at a file level but at a sector level.  This means that the backup version will include all data in the changed sector from the drive, which may include other files etc.

Thank you for the reply.  I also had a web chat concerning this and other questions.  If I understand you correctly I can set up incremental backups locally but all that does is backup the changed sectors.  If so it raises some more queries:

1. Can I view the files in an old incremental backup and will it show all files?

2. If so if I chose to restore a file from an old incremental backup will it restore the file at the time of the backup?

From your comments if I choose to use Acronis Cloud then individual files are backed up and old versions of those files are kept. Is this correct?

Mike, yes, you can view files in any incremental backup using the Recovery panel in the main ATI GUI for the backup task, where there will be a drop-down list showing the date / time for each file in the backup version chain.  You can select one of those 'recovery points in time' and look at the files that were present at that point.

Note: such recovery points will be a snapshot of how all the source backup data looked at that point in time.  So if you created an incremental backup each day at 6pm, you would see the state of play for all your files at that point in time on the selected day.  If you have modified a file several times during the day, you will only see how the file was when the backup was made.

Acronis Cloud also uses a 'Changed Block Tracker' (CBT) mechanism but with some differences to how local backups are made, but again, this is not at an individual file level as far as I understand.

You may want to look at the Synchronization feature of ATI instead of backup to see if that offers more options for actual versioning?