Backup versions missing from clean up tool list
Hi,
My backup scheme is set to do daily incremental backups and a full backup after every 6 incremental versions, with a clean up rule of deleting version chains older than 31 days. Backups are saved to an 4TB external drive. Full backups are ~425GB. However, I noticed that the external drive was nearly full, because there are backup versions retained from as long as 4 months ago.
I used the clean up tool to remove a couple of older versions, but there are several versions that are not listed in the tool. Attached is the list of all the .tib files on the external drive. The cleanup tool currently "sees" the files dated on or after 12/26/2021 (versions b8 and later), but it does not see the files before 12/26 (versions b4-b7).
Is it ok to just delete those manually? Do you know why these might not be detected by the cleanup tool?
Thanks for your help.
Thank you, Steve.
I've tried your suggestion, but I get the following error message:
Failed to add the backup to the backup list. The backup may be locked or corrupted. Also, make sure the folder contains the last volume of the backup, and does not contain a renamed copy of the same backup.
One thing I've notice is that the affected versions (b4-b7) do not include both a full backup TIB file and a set of incremental files. b4 & b5 have only full backup files, and b6 and b7 have only incremental files.
And now I just noticed that b9 does not appear in the clean up tool listing either. And also has just a single full backup file. Not sure if the missing files were successfully deleted or were never there to begin with.
So would these be classified as "corrupted" backups since the full set is not there? And if so, would it be safe to delete the manually, or is there another approach I should try?
Thanks again,
Matt
Matt, if the files cannot be added back then the next step would be to try moving one of the unlisted files to another drive then running a validation for the task to see if it comes up with any errors?
I suspect that over time you have changed the Backup Scheme settings for this task, i.e. perhaps had the option to not delete the first backup enabled at one time and removed it later, and / or changed whether incrementals are created or not etc.
Steve, I will give that a shot. Just to make sure I understand, the idea is that if it passes validation after moving the files to another drive, then it is ok to manually delete the files?
And then, going forward, it should retain the entire set of files for each version and purge versions based on the backup scheme. Do I have this right?
You may be right that I changed the scheme at some point (I'm sure I wouldn't be able to recall). However, the b9 file (full backup with no incremental backups), was created only a couple of weeks ago. I'm pretty certain I didn't change anything that recently. Not sure why there are no incremental files for that version.
I'll run the validation this afternoon and let you know the outcome.
Thanks again.
UPDATE:
Validation was successful after moving one of the full backup files (b5) and one set of incremental files for which no full backup exits (a total of 10 b6 incremental files).
Matt, if validation didn't throw any errors after moving some files, then any references to those moved files don't exist in the tracking database ATI uses, so it should be safe to delete them via Explorer.
Makes sense. I may return with more questions if the problem persists going forward (ie, files missing for some backup versions & auto-cleanup not occurring as a result), but you've helped me to resolve the immediate issue of safely getting rid of the old files that are filling up the drive. Thanks again, Steve. I appreciate your help.
update:
Ok, I deleted all the old, incomplete backup versions. Subsequently, under my routine backup scheme, a full backup has been generated for the current version, and a set of files from an older version has been removed as expected following my cleanup rule specification. However, two files from that version remain (~b8_s3_v1.tbi and ~b8_s5_v1.tib). These are two incremental backups that had a second file in the chain (~b8_s3_v1-2.tib and ~b8_s5_v1-2.tib). All of the other increments in the chain had a single file (s1, s2, s4, and s6). In other words, the cleanup deleted the last file created for each of the 6 incremental versions specified in my plan to be created within the full version. So it appears that when multiple incremental versions are created (for whatever reason that happens), only the last once will be deleted by the auto cleanup, and the others need to be removed manually. Is this how it is supposed to work?
Matt, Acronis will create duplicate named backup files when it encounters another file of the same name as it is intending to create already present on the drive. That scenario can occur due to an interrupted backup operation or one being cancelled etc.
This is described in the ATI 2020 User Guide: Backup file naming
If you are creating a new backup, and there is already a file with the same name, the program does not delete the old file, but adds to the new file the "-number" suffix, for example, my_documents_inc_b2_s2_v1-2.tib.
I believe that it is probably a bug in the automatic cleanup code that it doesn't also remove such orphaned files, especially when they are incremental and the other elements of the chain they belong to have already been deleted!
You will need to manually delete those orphaned files.
Thank you, Steve. Really appreciate your help.