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How many incrementals in a chain.

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I am curious what is recommended as a maximum no. of incrementals in a chain.  I have had some restore problems and I found the recommended method from Acronis on how to permenently kill the active protection, and wanted to test.

To test I was taking several incrementals, mounting the imaqe to see if I could  play a file and if good then doing a restore.  All well went well until I had 18 incrementals.  The chain mounted, I was able to play the file and felt all was well.  I use the Linux recovery and when I went to restore the file it simply couldn't find the chain.  So that was a fail.

Any thoughts.

 

Pete

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Hi Pete, could you provide more details on you inability to find the chain. Do you mean that you cannot find the backup task at all, or that only some of the incremental backups seem to be present.

If it is the former, it may be that the Linux recovery media does not have the necessary drivers to access the backup location. This can happen with USB devices where the USB controller is not supported, or where you have a raid configuration. Also, there can be issues with USB boxes with multiple HDDs, either using RAID or non-RAID.

My I suggest that you try the Windows recovery media rather than the Linux media. You create with Windows recovery media from within ATI: Tools, then Rescue Media Builder and select Simple or Advanced deepening on your needs.

The thing to remember is that something can always go wring with any backup strategy; Out of abundant caution I always accept the default configuration of each chain comprising the full backup and 5 incremental backups. While I once managed to successfully do a recovery from a chain with 70+ incremental backup (created by ATI 2014). It is always good practice to backup to multiple locations: I backup to a local HDD, to my NAS and to Acronis Cloud. Important files are also copied to two other computers for which there are similar backups.

For my critical data I have one daily backup and one weekly backup (each with 5 increments in the chain), plus a daily and weekly backup to the Acronis Cloud.

Hi Ian  (I hope I got your name right(

 

Some more detail of what I did.

I did a reinstall of 2018, and then following the faq I turned off active protection. I was retesting as I had a  few restore failures,, but I hadn't used the Acronis procedure for turning off Active Protection  I then set up a simple setup.  1 Full and unlimited incrementals.   I build the linux recovery environment as it's faster then the Winpe's.

I then took a full and 5 incrementals.  After every incremental I mounted and checked the  image.  After the 5tth I  did a full restore with the linuxRE.

I then took 5 more  incrementals and repeated the restore.  Everything went fine.

I then took 8 more incrementals.  the mounting the image check was fine so I attempted the restore.  When I went into the RE, and navigated to the image files there was nothing there.  Booted back to Windows and went into ATI.  Tried the recovery from the GUI, but again no images at all. 

At this point I uninstalled.

 

Last  night I re installed and setup a full and 7 incrementals, retaining 2 chains.  Am retesting with this setup.

 

Pete

Hi Ian

I took your sugesstion about settting and have  been beating on it with images every half hour  and restores very frequently and all is well.

 

Thanks for the tipi

Pete, good to hear things are working out well for you.

Ian

I am tempted to do a month's worth....one full and 30 increments an external 4TB drive.  Is this a bad idea??  I do have other backups just in case (cloud, second external backup.)

Richard, the honest answer here is 'it depends!'.

If you are using an older version of ATI such as 2019 and earlier, or using ATI 202+ doing Files & Folders backups - all those that still use .TIB files where incrementals are stored in separate files, then the higher number of incrementals can also increase risk should a single incremental file become corrupted / damaged or lost, as the chain is broken at that point.

With ATI 2020 onwards using .TIBX files where incrementals are automatically consolidated into the initial Full file, then the risks are different but less when using larger numbers.

With the older .tib incrementals then I tended to keep the number down to around the default values but with the new .tibx incrementals, I have used higher numbers up to around 30 for some of my tasks and all has been good to date.

As with any backup scheme, having multiple backups using multiple storage locations etc is recommended for resilience and protection.