true image doesnt delete old chains

i have 4 tb backup drive. the machine has a 2tb drive (90 percent full) and a 500 gig drive (25% full). the goal is have one full backup then 6 days of differentials then upon the next full backup, delete that old chain. so i assumed that on sunday i get the full backup. 6 days of diff then next sunday the old gets deleted and the new gets started.

Acronis never deletes any older files until after a new Full backup has been successfully created, which for your settings also starts the 7 days counter too, so no files would be deleted until after those 7 days have elapsed too!

I would suggest changing the automatic cleanup option to use 'Store no more than 1 recent version / version chains' instead of the current option.  This will still not delete anything until after a new Full backup has been created but the delete will be immediately after!

Your 4TB backup drive will still need to be able to hold your 2 x Full backup files and 6 x Differential backup files for this to work otherwise you will need to either reduce the amount of data involved or split the task into more than one backup of data for different source data.

im pretty sure i did have it set to not store more than one chain  and wound up with a month of chains but ill change it back to that and monitor. thats what i couldnt figure out. why it kept a month worth of stuff when set

as an aside, i logged into my online account today. just for fun

it says my computer hasnt been in contact 32 days. which is funny becausei literally use it every day. . then it said something about cloud storage being full. i never used, never setup, nor want anything to be done in the cloud. just is weird. under sync  in the program it says 'create sync' which to me implies i never did it . any idea what is up?

when i clicked delete to delete the computer it said something about retaining a system image. no clue why since i never backup to the cloud. i have a NAS with raid.

Ted, in ATI 2018 communication with the Acronis Dashboard is performed via the Acronis Managed Machine Service Mini background service, so it might be that you have this set to either Manual or Disabled in the Windows Services control panel.

You would need a subscription for Acronis Cloud storage to be able to store any images in that location.

Sync is again a feature that can be used with Acronis Cloud or else would be between two or more PC's each running ATI.

Personally, I set the MMSM service to Manual on all my PC's because I do not want them to be registered in the online Acronis Dashboard, especially when Acronis have demonstrated multiple times how they can reset all backup task configuration settings to original defaults by making errors in the dashboard servers!  Unfortunately, in ATI 2021, they have now started registering PC's in the dashboard using the new AAKORE service!  (completely undocumented by Acronis!).

for the fun of it i checked

managed machine service is running

mobile backup server is stopped

nonstop backup service is running as are scheduler and sync agent

i deleted all backup files of my one backup and started with a full last night so we will see in a week what happens.

for the online dashboard window that lists my license and then that i successfully backed up over night, i dont see a way to delete that. strangely enough i DO want to see that on my friends computer that hers backed up last night because i'm her IT guy and she's been having issues so i like to monitor her machine

ok this is nuts.  i have the versions set to delete after 7 days . but now its looking for version 3 which i deleted manually last week because i needed the space. but it wont do the backup now.

i deleted the entire backup and settings. starting totally new. set it for 6 differential and delete chains after 7 days so i hope this gives me one full. 6 diff. then repeat and rinse

ted rush wrote:

ok this is nuts.  i have the versions set to delete after 7 days . but now its looking for version 3 which i deleted manually last week because i needed the space. but it wont do the backup now.

i deleted the entire backup and settings. starting totally new. set it for 6 differential and delete chains after 7 days so i hope this gives me one full. 6 diff. then repeat and rinse

Ted, if you delete any .tib files manually you will cause this type of issue because you leave behind references to those deleted files in the database used by ATI!

You either should run a validation for the task after deleting any files and respond to the error pop up messages for each missing file, or else force a rebuild of the database as per the steps given in KB 60915: Acronis True Image: repairing program settings

If you have deleted the original backup task and create a new task, then this should also have resolved the issue.  Ideally you should use a new / unique name for the task.

problem with error messages is sometimes they dont find the file and say hit ignore but there is no ignore button! so have to cancel

but i have other bad news. i had to turn off validation. this was even after rebuilding the database, after starting a brand new backup set. over the weekend it would try to validate for over 8 or 10 hours then toward the end give an error and have to stop. i tried this at least 3 times. first off i dont think it should take 8 hours when the diff backup took 27 minutes. but even when you let it run, it never would finish. so i just turned off validation for that backup.

on my windows drive validation works just find and takes a normal amount of time but thats less than 100 gigs of data.  the other backup was 912 gigs out of 1.8 tb on that 2nd drive. i have another backup of that 2nd part of the 2nd drive that i manaully do once a week and that one validates just fine as well.

as long as 7 days passes and it does all the differential and they deletes the old files il guess ill deal with it

now i'm even more perplexed. i deleted my entire D drive backup that made up 1 TB of my 2TB drive. i created 2 smaller backups of the 1TB of files. yesterday did full backups of both. i forgot to turn on validation of the one.  but the other successfully validated

for the one that did validate, once the full was done and validated, the next time it did differential and that group of files rarely changes. the differential took 4 min and zero files were backed up yet it said it was going to take over 10 hours to validate. why in the world would it do that when literally no new files were backed up?

Ted, how did you do the deleting of your entire D drive backup?  Did you delete this from the ATI 2018 GUI using the Delete > Delete entirely option?  That is the recommended method as should clean up the information about the backup held in the internal database used by ATI to track files for backups.

Personally, I never use validation with my backup tasks as I see no real benefits in using this feature with scheduled tasks given the extra time it tends to require.

Validation does not guarantee that the backup image will result in a successful recovery when needed at some time in the future!  All it does is read the checksum values stored within the image file and recalculates new checksum values as the file is read which are then compared with those stored.  If the values match, validation is good.  What it doesn't do is ensure that good data was captured, i.e. that there is no corruption on the source data, no missing files, viruses etc.

yes i deleted entirely so i would have no worries. or so i thought. sigh. and im' ready to toss out validation as well. i'm gonna let the current 2 backups complete with it just for the fun of it. then i can focus on ensuring the full/diff ones are going as planned. 

i just have bad luck with this program. i checked and my C drive had been on full followed by 6 differentials forever. well now i see it is doing all full backups the past 3 days. no diffs. very strange. also it only validated the most recent, not the past 2 full backups. very very strange. i never had issues with the C and havent changed settings in a long time. and history shows perfect backup with validation every day for weeks. but it's so small i dont mind full backups of 110 gigs a day.

edit: ok heres some fun news. on the backup that i started brand new 2 days ago, i let it validate over night. so 12 hours later it says cannot find version 5 of the backup. well i just started it 2 days ago so there cannot be version 5 lol. i'm turning off validation for my D drive. problem solved. i also sometimes get 'bad media' errors and it says retry but when i hit retry it works so i doubt its bad media. i have RAID in a NAS and i doubt the drives are failing yet. i think barely 3 or 4 years old