Want to use 2 alternating drives. What to do best?
I have started Acronis True Image 2020 a couple of weeks ago.
My plan is to alternate two external drives with one of them always being stored at a safe place (at my bank) and one being in use on my PC. I want to exchange these two drives about once a month, to have one drive as a backup of the backup, just in case something happens here at home -like a burglary or a fire- so that I have another backup available that is not too old (max a month) and that I can use to restore files.
I wonder if I can use the very same backup plan and just exchange the drives. Or would it be better to create a second backup plan (which would be identical with the first one) for the second drive?
How do I go about this?
Any help would be very much appreciated.
Many thanks in advance.
Sigrid
Thank you, Steve, for the friendly welcome and information.
I was away from home for a couple of days and therefore didn't have the time/chance to reply earlier.
From what you write I understand that it would be best to start another backup plan for my alternating external drive. I, yet, didn't find the time to check ATI2020 to see if it will be difficult to select, which plan will be run onto which drive, etc.. Do you have any recommendations what to set up and how?
Again many thanks for your help. :)
Sigrid
Sigrid, I do something similar but only in a vague sense. I have two drives that I alternate to the offsite storage on a periodic basis. Neither of these drives are part of my daily backup.
Since you say you move the drive to the bank about once a month, you're obviously OK with having an up to one month old backup in a worst case scenario.
What I do is use the Rescue Media for the offsite backups. I just do a complete full backup of each drive on the offsite drive. Rather than once a month, I do it when I get a Windows quality update... which is basically about once a month.
As Steve said, Acronis does not handle the idea of using different drives for the same backup task and trying to get around that can be messy.
That said, what you could do in your case is to have two separate tasks for the two drives. When you want to switch drives, you could deschedule the task for the new offsite drive and reschedule the task for the onsite drive. It's a manual process but so it taking the drive to the bank. It would only take a minute.
Hi Bruno,
Sorry for not answering sooner. We got a new router and had some installation issues which kept me from logging into this Acronis Forum site.
Your ideas are very interesting and give us some food for thought. Do you create a Rescue Media AND after that put a full backup onto the same drive?
I assume you have several (at least two) backup plans that you switch between (= deschedule and reschedule)?
From what you wrote it should not be too difficult for us to figure out how that is done and I think we're ready to start this new task as soon as the other issues with the router are totally solved. Thank you so very much for your help and information.
Hi Sigrid,
My rescue media is a 16GB USB 2.0 thumb drive, which is bigger than I need. The backups go to WD MyPassport Ultra USB 3.0 drives. When running from rescue media, there is no precreated backup task... you just boot the rescue media and configure thee backup and run it. A feature request has been made to allow for some preconfiguring of a backup to be run under the rescue media.
As for my last paragraph, I'm suggesting you create two backup tasks... one for each backup drive. They could be created identically except for the name. One task should have your backup schedule (daily?) while the other is not scheduled. When you are ready to move one drive offsite, before doing so have that drive connected and then open the backup task options and select Do Not Schedule. Then you can remove the drive. When you bring the other drive back, connect it and turn on the schedule for it. [I'm saying to have the drive connected when you modify the schedule because if it is not connected you probably won't be able to get into the options. Another feature request has been made to eliminate this restriction.]
Thank you, Bruno, for the once again very detailed information.
You're helping us a lot with getting things going. It will probably be not before the weekend/beginning of next week that we get to doing this.
If we get stuck, we will contact you again and request more help. :) And if we will manage to get our second backup up and running, we'll let you know too. :)
Until then,
Season's Greetings from AK
Just a quick info:
Last evening I've finally taken the time and followed your instructions to create a second task etc. etc.
Everything works fine and just as you described. The first drive will make it's trip to the bank safe today. Yeah! What a great way to start a new year.
Again many thanks for all you detailed information.
Happy New Year!