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Help avoiding backup drive becoming full

Thread needs solution

I have Acronis True Image Home 2011

I need an idiots guide to show me how to set up the backups.

The version option deletes backups over 6 months old. Why would you want a backup more than a couple of weeks old? And how can 6 months of backups fit on an external drive anyway?

My C: drive has only used 90gb yet my 500gb backup drive is almost full. How do I clean up my backup drive?

Any sensible help would be appreciated. If I don't get anywhere I will have to bite the bullet and pay to upgrade to 2012, that way I might actually get some help from Acronis who seem to wash their hands of the second your years up.

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Move the TIB files that have been created to another directory you create on your backup disk. This will preserve them in the next step.
Launch ATI and delete your current backup task.
Click on create a disk and partition backup
In the upper right, click on swith to disk mode
Select the disk where you have your system
Click on the destination, choose browse. Double click your way until you have opened the directory where you want to store your backups.
In the box where you can enter you backup name, choose a simple backup name, like "System".
Click OK.
Click on the blue link that says "Version Chain"
This opens the backup settings window. For the backup scheme, choose Custom. Below, choose Incremental. Select to do a new full backup every 6 incrementals (if you do a daily backup) or every 3 incrementals (if you do a weekly backup). This will give you a new full every week, or every month.
Turn auto-cleaning on.
Choose to store only the most recent 4 backup chains (for the daily backup above) or 1 backup chain (for the weekly backup above). This will set it to keep one month worth of backups.
Go to the advanced tab.
Under validation, choose to either validate your backups when they are done, or schedule a weekly schedule. In the advanced settings of the validation settings uncheck all the boxes, close the schedule window, close the backup settings window.
Now click on the blue schedule link for the backup task. Schedule your backup either daily or weekly. In the advanced settings of that scheduler, uncheck all the boxes. Close that window.
Click backup now.
Once the backup is complete. Validate it (click on operations -> validate).
Now produce your recovery CD using the bootable recovery media builder.
Once the CD is produced, boot your computer on it. Browse to your backup. Recover a coupl of files. Get familiar with the recovery of the whole disk. You will see that the drive letters on the CD may not be the same as in Windows. Look at the drive letters.

Pat L

Thank you very much. I can’t thank you enough for a sensible and understandable answer.

I’m a fairly simple home computer user and wanted to keep a copy of my computer just in case, but I find the user guide more or less unintelligible.

All the fancy bits and bobs don’t interest me; I just want it to do a basic job that I hope I don’t ever need to use! However if I do ever need it I’d like to know that I had the necessary image available.

I noticed that on your examples “schedule” wasn’t turned on. What schedule do you recommend?

Thanks again for your help, you should consider righting a full idiots guide.