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Do I need to reformat backup Drive to create/update survival kit? Would old original backup still work

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I am new to Acronis and am trying to determine if it is actually suitable to my needs. I've already purchased it, so hopefully I can get things working as they should. I have a Windows 10 Pro system I7.  I have been hearing horror stories about people dutifully backing up their computers only to find their external Hard drives don't boot up correctly if at all. 

I have read through the messages in the forum and still have a few questions. When I purchased Acronis 2020 I created a survival disk on a 8tb WD drive. Everything seemed to be ok. However, I decided to start a new backup scheme and delete all the backups on the Acronis designated drive except for the original full backup. Is that original full backup tied to the 2tb partition on the Acronis drive? I deleted all the backup schemes I created and tried to start a new one, picked the drives to be backed up, and the destination. But when I select the destination, which is the original Acronis drive, there is no option to create a "Survival Disk". The option does appear if I choose a disk that never had any backups on it.  

 Essentially I just want to have a backup drive I can rely on. BTW, do I need to create a new backup drive once the current one is full? Creating a separate Survival Drive etc? 

 Here are a couple of pics showing how the destination drive doesn't list the option  "Create Survival Disk" and a copy of the partition layout of the Acronis Drive.

 

Thank you in advance for any help. I am at a loss right now. 

 

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Jon, welcome to these public User Forums.

Once you have created a Survival Kit drive then you should be able to use this with more than one computer when needed, provided that you can access all the internal disk drives in those computers when booted from the SK drive.

The backups stored on your 7TB NTFS Acronis Backup I: partition of the drive are completely independent of the SK partition (Acronis HM 2GB) on that drive - the latter is essentially the Acronis rescue media stored in that partition instead of needing to use a separate USB stick or DVD to boot from.

If you configure your backup settings appropriately, you should be able to continue storing your backup files on the 7TB drive for a long time (unless you have very very large backup files!).

ATI allows you to set automatic cleanup rules for your backup on the Backup scheme settings page, where you can set limits on how many backup files are created before the oldest files are deleted automatically.

I would recommend making backups to more than one destination as this would create a potential 'single point of failure' should the backup drive suffer from a power surge or hardware failure etc.  Best practise for backups recommend using a 3-2-1 approach, where you make 3 different backups to at least 2 different destinations and keep 1 backup offline and/or offsite so is completely isolated from any electronic attack by malware / ransomware or physical attack by fire / flood / theft etc.

For my own main PC, I have backups going to a second internal drive, to an external USB drive, to my network NAS drive and to the Acronis Cloud, plus vital data / documents are synchronised to my other PC's across my network and backed up separately on those PC's too.

Spare disk drives are relatively inexpensive for up to 2TB sizes - I probably have over half a dozen such drives in my collection with most kept disconnected when not being used.