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How to move old backup files to external drive

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I have been using True Image for years. 2020 is currently installed.

Until now, I used it by making a daily incremental backup of 3-4 selected work folders (more 100,000 files) of C, at the first login, with a full backup every 30 days to the internal drive D. When I ran out of storage on D, I moved the older archives to a larger external drive. Unfortunately, when I had to open the saves, it took a lot of time. Fortunately, it was only needed a couple of times.

I tried the same with a partition backup a couple of months ago. I make a daily incremental backup of the entire C partition (excluding Windows folder), with a full backup every 30 days. The first full backup is ~30GB, the last incremental backup is ~40GB (in one file, instead of the previous multi-file solution). This way, the full backup is also faster, and the daily incremental only takes a few minutes. But most importantly: opening the archive and restoring files is very fast.

Unfortunately, there is only enough space on the target D drive for 3-4 such 40GB saves. (My goal is to have a daily backup of 2-3 years - 1-2TB - available if necessary.)

My question: how can I "properly" move the older 40GB backups to an external drive so that they are available when needed. (I'm not sure if my previous method was ok: simply move the older files in the file manager.)

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My question: how can I "properly" move the older 40GB backups to an external drive so that they are available when needed. (I'm not sure if my previous method was ok: simply move the older files in the file manager.)

Otto, welcome to these public User Forums.

Moving any .TIBX backups can be problematic due to the use of metadata, so if you were to do this then you need to ensure that you keep both the source folder contents and external drive contents fully mirrored for all changes!

The better and easier managed method would be to create a duplicate backup of the same source data directly to your external drive, such that it is self-managing via using automatic cleanup without any need to manually copy anything.

Thank you for your answer.

Unfortunately, it would be quite problematic to manage that the large capacity external drive is connected at the first start every day. It's a laptop and it varies where I physically turn it on first during the day. (So 200GB is available for my continuous daily saves. Which, in the best case, is enough to save 4-5 months. That's why I'm looking for a solution to store older saves externally.)

If I understand correctly, could the previous .TIB format (with all the files in the save chain) be easily moved to an external drive with a file manager and, if necessary, could a file be opened/restored from there?

If this is true, I will either return to the previous file/folder backup mode (which is significantly slower) or return to an earlier ATI version, which uses the .TIB format even for partition backups (if I remember correctly).

You can try moving from within the ATI app, but it is rather slow and (at least originally) a bit confusing as it changed the date stamp on the files. I prefer to remove the backup task, then copy the backfiles to the new location, then add back the backup task.