Automatically create new backup
I have incremental backups set for three hard drives. Each month I go into TI, clone the settings and turn off the schedule for the old backups. Is there a way to have this done automatically?
Tilden, I'm curious. Why are you doing this? What is it you are trying to accomplish?
Steve - Thanks for he reply. I thought that was the case but thought I might get lucky. :)
BrunoC - I'm not sure I understand what you are asking. Do you mean why am I cloning the backups, using incrementals or something else. But to answer overall, I need to keep backups for a year. I use them for my business and they provide the history I need. Breaking them into months seemed the obvious way to do it but if there is a better way, please explain. I just know the basics of TI so I might be handling backups totally wrong.
Tilden,
I understand more because you want to keep a year's worth of backups.
Are these File and Folder backups of just your business data (i.e., not full disk backups)? Are you currently running them with incremental? How often are you doing a full backup?
If you are not offloading the old backups to another drive you could just run a backup job indefinitely with automatic cleanups for those over a year old? If you're archiving the .tibs elsewhere, maybe cloning is the best option so as to always have the ATI databases with full knowledge of all the backups.
Tilden,
It's unfortunate that ATI does not have the capability you require. Bruno had a good idea, though. Create a new backup task that runs monthly to create your archive backups,and have the cleanup delete backups over one year old. The only downside is that you would be taking two backups once a month.
By the way, your cloning scheme has the advantage (in my opinion) of forcing a full backup once a month, regardless of the options in your backup scheme. Several people have asked Acronis for a "Start a new backup chain NOW" option. Your technique achieves that automatically.
BrunoC wrote:Are these File and Folder backups of just your business data (i.e., not full disk backups)? Are you currently running them with incremental? How often are you doing a full backup?If you are not offloading the old backups to another drive you could just run a backup job indefinitely with automatic cleanups for those over a year old? If you're archiving the .tibs elsewhere, maybe cloning is the best option so as to always have the ATI databases with full knowledge of all the backups.
I do a full backup of all four drives. It is set to incremental and to start over every 5 and to delete old versions over 7 days.
I also do a file incremental backup of the c drive that I manually reset each month. I did this to have access to some of the data for longer periods. Although with the above backup also being done, I see I should limit what this one backups.
For the other three drives, I do incremental backups of just some of the files and directories on them. I have full through the full backup above so for these incrementals, it is just data that changes often.
I used TI 2015 previously and it didn't have the auto-cleanup and I just set everything up as I had it previously, except for the full backup.
Should I just increase the full backup to use incrementals for a year with the auto-cleanup? That would just give me the one backup file. Is that the better way to do it? Any downsides?
Patrick O'Keefe wrote:Create a new backup task that runs monthly to create your archive backups,and have the cleanup delete backups over one year old. The only downside is that you would be taking two backups once a month.
I'm not sure I understand this. Did you mean to say "runs daily" or am I misunderstanding?
Tilden wrote:Should I just increase the full backup to use incrementals for a year with the auto-cleanup? That would just give me the one backup file. Is that the better way to do it? Any downsides?
Do NOT run incrementals for a year, at least if you are doing daily backups. The thing about incrementals is that you need all the files in the chain and if any one of them if missing or corrupted, all subsequent incrementals are of no use. Also, it means way too many files have to be read in a recovery situation. I run data incrementals for two weeks only, and that's as high as I'm willing to go.
One thing that is unclear to me... you said you keep backups for a year so you have the history. Do you need daily history? Or is it sufficient to have weekly or even monthly. In other words, do you need to be able to recover the state of a file for any specific day in the past year?
Tilden wrote:Patrick O'Keefe wrote:Create a new backup task that runs monthly to create your archive backups,and have the cleanup delete backups over one year old. The only downside is that you would be taking two backups once a month.
I'm not sure I understand this. Did you mean to say "runs daily" or am I misunderstanding?
I was suggesting you create a new task that just creates the monthly backups that you save for a year. Keep their creation separate from your daily backups. My paranoia suggests you make them full backups only - not incremental or differential. No chains that could get broken.
BrunoC wrote:Do NOT run incrementals for a year, at least if you are doing daily backups.One thing that is unclear to me... you said you keep backups for a year so you have the history. Do you need daily history? Or is it sufficient to have weekly or even monthly. In other words, do you need to be able to recover the state of a file for any specific day in the past year?
So should I switch to Differential and have it cycle every month? I know having the incrementals makes recovery very, very slow and it would be nice not having to wait so long.
I handle web sites so the backups are mainly for the changes I make to them. I need to be able to retrieve a sites files from specific dates for a variety of reasons. I probably don't need a full year but I've had instances where I had to go back over 6 months. So I need to access changes that have been made on a specific day.
Patrick O'Keefe wrote:I was suggesting you create a new task that just creates the monthly backups that you save for a year. Keep their creation separate from your daily backups. My paranoia suggests you make them full backups only - not incremental or differential. No chains that could get broken.
So I should do daily backups and monthly backups, both using differential. Is that correct?
Since you do a full backup with increment of all your drives, deleting chains over seven days, then you have the past week covered.
The need then is to have backups for your work and be able to pick any date over the past year to possibly recover from. Without knowing the quantity of data, frequency of updates, amount of backup disk space, etc. I can't answer completely.
My first thought is that you need backups of the work data taken daily so that you can recovery to any specific date. Incrementals would be better than differential to keep the amount of data backed up smaller. One possibility is to create a separate File and Folders backup job for each of your drives, just selecting the data files you need. Separating the drives can make for smaller files and faster recovery.
If you don't run on weekends (implied by your 5 increment statement earlier), you could do a Full followed by 20 increments which would give you one chain per month (approximately) for each drive. With automatic cleanup you could delete chains over 365 days.
If you have the backup space, this may meet all your objectives.