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Backup option to manage disk space better

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I have two home computers with average used disk space on them. Both of them are set up to backup to the same 2 TB NAS device and the backup options are the default Acronis options including disk cleanup. So I assumed 2 TB is enough but now the NAS device is full. I want to know what options to use to not fill up the drive. Acronis should be able to delete old backups and keep available space on the NAS device indefinitely. Really all I want is for it to have 2 complete backup sets of each machine. The fulls can be taken every month or so but that is flexible.

Thanks

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Greg,

If you have ATI 2011, I recommend you set up a custom scheme, do a new full after X partials, and set the autocleanup option to keep only Y most recent versions. That is the setting that seems to be the most reliable.
ATI 2011 will then do a full backup, followed by X partials, then a full, X partials, etc.
ATI 2011 will repeat this Y times. It will then do a new full, and, then, erase the first chain.

OK I reconfigured the job. I also manually deleted lots of old backups. I don't think I left only a part of any version. I just left the current version and the one just before that. Now the backups fail because it is trying to consolidate a version. I assume that version is gone. So how should I have deleted old versions and what is the best way to get the backups working this time?

Thanks in advance.

Greg,

You have 2 things working agains you: (1) deleting backup files manually confuses ATI which tries to keep track of where the archives are in its internal database, (2) consolidation is a tricky process and tend to be long and error-prone.

If you can, do not use consolidation. Just auto-clean your backup chains. Choose the setting where you keep only a certain number of backup chains.

Deleting backups with ATI 2011 can create issues, even if you do it right (using the delete backup command from the operations menu).

For this reason, it is better to set up a new task in a new directory.

If you want to reset everything, uinstall ATI, reboot and reinstall. THat will reset the database, scheduler, etc.

Pat
Thanks for your help. I went ahead and edited the existing job to write to a new subdirectory. The backups have worked since then. I know I took a blunt instrument type of way to delete the old backups so I should have done it differently but I wish Acronis would have handled it better.

Thanks again.

Greg,

You've done what most users do. ATI should be more flexible or smarter and not get "confused" by manual deletions.