Acronis used to be understandable by us mortals....
I'm beginning to wish I had never updated to 2020. Acronis is a great product -- I've been using it for about a decade, but why has it now become so obscure to the basic home user who doesn't wish to use "the cloud," and simply wants to perform a standard incremental drive backup, like me?
At first things were fine. Now I find that my three backups -- one for each drive -- have been duplicated. I.e., in the destination folder on my external drive for each one appear two tibx files, one with the usual name, another with "-0001" tacked on, the latter apparently created about 10 days after the first. Opening both reveals the same exact list of eight backups --same dates, same size, up the the most recent, two days ago. This is, again, the case for each of my three drive backups. In addition, Acronis says it has "No information about the file content" for two of them, one of which is my C drive, the other a storage drive. Why it shows info for the other, which is nice, I have no idea. It used to show for all three.
I would be grateful for any kind soul to patiently illuminate the (unnecessary?) mysteries of these issues for me.
Philip, without seeing how you've configured the backup task I can only guess. Offhand, it looks normal if you've got it set to take a new full backup. The first .tibx file will contain the first full and subsequent increments. When the next full is taken, the -0001.tibx file is created. But that does not mean you can get rid of the first .tibx. It is part of the chain.
When opening either file, I believe you are seeing the entire chain(s) of backups so they both appear the same.
I cannot respond on the content issue although others have been confused about this (assuming you are talking of the summary).
BrunoC, thank you. The new tibx makes sense as the new full backup. I guess I'll have to watch the development of the 0001 as new incremental backups are run. It would seem that the list is going to get awfully long is it keeps adding to all the original ones, but perhaps it starts afresh after I reach the number of full chains I have specified.
Probably this is covered in the user manual, but as I recall, the manual was already long and complex years ago, most of it covering capabilities I would never use. Anyway, thanks again.
Philip, if you are creating incremental chains, then all the inc files are now stored with the initial full for the chain in the 0001 file, so you won't see a 0002 file until a new chain is started.
See image below showing the contents of my own incremental backup file(s).
Thanks, Steve. Yes, that's about what mine looks like. What I don't really understand, is why the new full includes all the same previous backups as the one before it. A new full would start from the date it created itself, after I had reached a specified, say, five incremental backups. Am I missing something?
Philip, this is the way that the new .tibx files work. They use metadata to track files, so each file will contain information about all the files available for the task across all the version chains that are present.
Automatic cleanup for the task will remove all the files for any version chain when a new chain is started when the cleanup criteria are satisfied. When a new full backup is added, then the appended number is incremented, i.e. from 0001 to 0002 etc.
This is significantly different to how ATI handled backups with previous versions, hence all the KB documents I referenced in my earlier post, which deal with the dependency issues that have been introduced with .tibx files that users need to aware of.
Phillip,
Basically the rules for a backup chain have changed as Steve points out. All backup files contained in a Backup Task are dependent on each other. To use this effectively requires the user to examine the backup need and define a task that contains a minimum number of total files in the Backup task to fulfill the need for backup protection. In a nutshell, the user now defines the task parameters to fit the need as the default parameters fall far short in doing so.
The defaults can be used as a starting point but need to be refined to fit the needs of the user.
This change was make to provide enhancements in the application aimed to make it more reliable and efficient.