BUG report: cannot fix "not enough space on destination drive to perform backup"
Just noticed backup failed a week ago because drive filled up.
- "clean up" and many other options get removed from the task menu, forcing manual deletion of old backups
- manually deleting files to make space does NOT change the failed space message. Still cannot run backup. I freed up 430GB and a full backup is only 200GB
A contacted tech support, they did remote, but just deleted the broken task. I could have done that. So I'm reporting the bug here.
Notice menu is limited after destination drive full error:


- Log in to post comments

Anybody think they will ever come up with a fix for this very obvious bug. This keeps happening to me over and over and over again (about every 3 months since 2021.) Are we really expected to manually keep track of available disk space and manually perform the cleanup function or your entire backup set is trashed unless you buy a bigger drive to copy the backup set onto? Something bigger than 8TB is an expensive temporary fix for a major software defect.
And why doesn't "automatic cleanup" work? Never has since 2021 came out.
- Log in to post comments

Steven, automatic cleanup has been working just fine for me across multiple recent versions of Acronis True Image and ACPHO. I have not needed to start buying larger and larger storage drives - my own typically are 2TB or less, apart from my NAS which has 2 x 3TB using RAID. I have multiple different PC's doing regular backups with automatic cleanup enabled and have not had to do any manual cleanup actions for years.
Automatic cleanup
There can be lots of confusion around the topic of automatic cleanup which can be better understood if some basic concepts are known!
First: automatic cleanup only works on complete(d) versions / version chains. Do not expect individual elements of version chains to be cleaned up, such as incremental or differential files!
Second: automatic cleanup only runs after a new Full backup for the next version / version chain has been created successfully. This means that there must be sufficient free space available on the storage drive / location to hold a new Full backup image file!
Third: counting of days does not start until after a new Full backup file has been created when using the option to ‘Delete versions / version chains older than X days.’ It does not start for the active backup version / version chain before that point!
Fourth: the simplest & easiest automatic cleanup option to use & understand is to ‘Store no more than X recent versions / version chains.’ The criteria here means that if you set X = 2, then when the X+1 (3rd) version / version chain is created successfully with a new Full backup file, then the oldest version / version chain will be deleted by automatic cleanup.
Example:
Incremental backup task, using Full plus 5 Incremental backups before next new Full backup.
Task scheduled to run daily with automatic cleanup set to ‘Store no more than 2 version chains.’
Day 1 – Full backup created.
Days 2 – 6 Incremental backups created.
Day 7 – Next new Full backup created.
Days 8 – 12 Incremental backups created.
Day 13 – Next new Full backup created. Automatic cleanup deletes files created on days 1 – 6.
If the same task used ‘Delete version chains older than 7 days’, then those 7 days wouldn’t start counting until day 7 for the first set of files (version chain 1) and not until day 13 for the second set etc. So automatic cleanup wouldn’t delete the oldest chain until day 14 in the above example.
- Log in to post comments