How to Handle Swapping Drives Weekly?
Grover recommended that I have two separate backups in TIB2014, one for each of the two drives I cycle in and out.
That's fine, but I can't figure out how I would schedule this, and/or how Acronis would know which drive is connected.
If I set up the two disks to come in with different drive letters, and schedule one backup to run every night and backup to the E: drive, and another backup to run every night to backup to the F: drive, then it seems like I would have a failure every night on whatever backup drive is NOT connected. A failure every night = a failure notice every morning even though the "failure" was anticipated.
I cannot figure out how I could schedule one backup to create a Full on Monday, followed by 6 Incrementals, and then take a week off while I shuttle in the other drive.
Bottom line: having two different backup routines for the two different drives sounds like a great idea, except I can't figure out how to make that work.
Tom Mills
SimpliTek
Yes I have. That's all fine and good except expecting the user to go in and Not Schedule the right job for the disk that is NOT connected at any given time seems to me to be WAY too much to ask. I consider it a success if they just get the right drive swapped in on any given Monday.
There are so many ways they could screw that up that to me, that is just not an option. I can barely keep the jobs doing what I want to, already, without mucking with them every Monday when the disk is swapped out.
I hate to keep beating this dead horse, but the main reason I am having this problem is that Acronis stuck all those letters at the end of the file name and there is no way to turn them off. Before they did that, I could manage this just fine - I just created a full backup each day, and ran a script before the backup ran, that deleted the oldest backup, renamed the others and then made room for Acronis to create a new backup with the same filename as yesterday. Tomorrow, rinse and repeat.
This plan worked fine. Then Acronis comes along and "improves" their product by making a change that is detrimental to the way I used the product, with no way to work around it. To me this is a classic example of not listening to their customers.
Unless someone can help me come up with some other way to do this other than having to suspend a job every week when that drive is not connected, I fear that I may reluctantly have to move on to another product.
Tom Mills
SimpliTek
One method of achieving every other week backup tasks would be to use the Windows Scheduler instead of the Acronis scheduler.
The Windows scheduler will provide more scheduling options.
Here are some general examples. Note the "schedule every 2 weeks" example.
A. How to use Win7 scheduler to run TIH backup tasks
B. How to use Windows XP Task Schedule Every 3 days and Schedule Every 2 weeks
The Acronis business software may also have more scheduling options.