How to move old backup files to external drive
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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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).
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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.
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