Deleting files from Acronis Cloud
After spending too all long in a chat session with Acronis support and receiving either canned responses or replies that lacked basic understanding of the Acronis True Image, I figured this forum might well have a deeper knowledge base.
My question is whether in a File and Folder backup to Acronis Cloud, files that are deleted on the source computer will ever be deleted from the cloud. My concern is that backups to AC become far less appealing if it is guaranteed that the backup space will fill with junk that is no longer desired.
I tested the "Store no more than N versions" retention policy. It does indeed preserve a limited number of modifications to existing files. Is does not delete any files. Lacking a suitable time machine, I can't readily test whether the "Delete File Versions that are older than X Months/Weeks/Days" removes deleted objects.
I don't particularly want to shove 1+TB of data into the slow Acronis Cloud access portal before determining whether backups will need to be redone in their entirety after a sufficient number of source files are deleted.
Thanks for any insights the community can provide!
After more than a week's testing, I can report my findings: Acronis True Image 2018 never deletes old files from cloud backups automatically. This means that Acronis Cloud storage needs to either be pruned manually - not practical in real world usage - or you periodically need to delete an entire backup and redo it from scratch. Needless to say this is inefficient in terms of time and effort for Acronis customers.
I did a very simple backup consisting of a single file. I then performed two more backups, deleting the existing file creating a new one after each backup. Finally I altered the lone existing file twice, again performing a backup after each change.
The Acronis Cloud cleanup settings were to store no more than 2 recent file versions and to delete file versions older than 2 days.
Version cleanup works correctly. Old versions of altered files are indeed removed. There is a disconnect between the cloud console and the local Acronis instance. The cloud console displays everything - existing files and deletions - with the option to either recover the latest versions of multiple files or folders or a particular version for a single file.
The local Acronis TI 2018 happily reports that one or more files will be recovered for a particular backup version. This is misleading because deleted files will only be recovered if they still existed at the time of the backup while altered files will not be recovered at all if the version retention policy was set to eliminate versions from that date or older. This makes restoring files from the local instance hit-or-miss; even though Acronis reports that files will be recovered and the Activity monitor states that files were indeed restored, nothing is actually recovered.
On to the issue of file deletions. If local files are deleted from a folder tree, these files live forever in the cloud. Looking through both my test backup and several larger whole disk backups I performed, no files are ever deleted from the cloud, no matter what the retention policy is set to. The implications of this policy are that you either need to poke through the cloud console deleting files one-by-one or the cloud storage space will eventually fill up with junk files that are no longer needed.
Browsing and pruning each Acronis Cloud backup is not practical except perhaps for a user who only backs up a single folder. Customers who purchase multiple terabytes of cloud storage from Acronis are going to have hundreds of thousands to millions of files online.
The other option is to periodically delete each online backup and redo it from scratch. This obviously loses any older versions of files you may have and leaves your data unprotected during the time it takes to upload the new full base backup. This points to another weakness in Acronis Cloud - upload speeds are not particularly fast. Working from our office I can upload to AWS or Google Cloud and be limited only by our outgoing bandwidth (2+ Gbps). Dropbox is somewhat slower but still runs at near GigE speed. Acronis Cloud pokes along, occasionally peaking at 50Mbps but usually dropping to 1-5 Mbps and sometimes slower still. Large initial backups take days to complete rather than under an hour to other cloud providers.
Acronis could greatly assist cloud customers by implementing the type of file retention policy found at all other major cloud storage providers: Support automated deletion of locally deleted files after a specified interval. Alternatively Acronis Cloud could be opened up to contain the *.tib backup files rather than the existing one-file-at-a-time scheme.
Ethan, please raise a Support Case directly with Acronis for your findings about the Cloud cleanup results and handling of deleted files etc. We are just a user forum so have no ability to effect changes other than through the support route.
For this type of case, I would recommend using the email option rather than trying to handle the case via live chat, that way you are not being tied to your computer for what could be a lengthy conversation and interaction with Acronis support.