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Incremental back ups are filling up my backup drive

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I set up a full system back up to an external 1TB drive with auto consolidation setting of:
Number of backup versions exceeds = 2
Storage period of old backup versions exceeds = 30days
Size of backup exceeds = 500GB
This created a full back up of 572GB then the incremental backups average at about 20GB. After the second incremental backup it ran a consolidation backup which ended up creating a backup of about 370GB which filled up my storage and caused my back ups to fail.
How can I set up a backup which will not constantly create storage issues?

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Alan,
You have two problems working against you.
1. Your storage disk is too small and its size prevents it from storing two full backups.
2. Acronis will not delete its backup until AFTER its replacement has been completed .
Thus, as Acronis cannot complete its replacement (full backup #2), you get an error message as disk is full

Your options are:
1. Get a larger disk such as a 2TB disk.
and/or,
2. If you wish to continue to use only the 1 TB storage disk, you will need to use the tib file delete option from within the program and delete ALL your tib backup files so the 1TB is empty before the next full.

GH5. How to delete backup files using Acronis Backup 'Explorer'

Your current setting of keep 2 and disk size limits are causing the consolidation and it is not working for you. I would stop using those settings so no consolidation occurs. Consolidation is trickiy in that you are asking the program to correctly fit all 10,000pieces of data when all the pieces look alike. Any mistake make the data useless. I avoid all use of consolidation.

Prior to the Acronis data base tracking, user were able to write a batch file for automatic delete prior to its replacement creation but now, any deletion must be done via the program.

If you wish to continue to use only the 1 TB storage disk, you will need to use the tib file delete option from within the program and delete ALL your tib backup files so the 1TB is empty before the next full.

A simple non-custom incremental task will work, using the 1TB, in that you will have to manually track the backups and perform you own deletion whenvever you wish to do so before the disk gets too many backups. Your extra space over and above the one full gves you some temp storage room for several incrementals before the next full is needed but you will need to delete ALL backups before the next full will successfully run on the 1 TB disk.

If yo had a 2 TB storage disk, you could automate into something like this example where you could store 6 inc and store no more than 2 recent version chains. (rather than my example of keep 4 chains)

GH12. Create Custom Incremental Backup Scheme. 6 Inc, Keep 4 chains. The 6-4 is user choice.

Thanks GroverH
This is my home desk top PC which we only use for checking email, browsing the net and storing media (music, photos and the like). I only really want a fairly recent back up just in case my system crashes and I need to restore. It's not vital to have multiple backups.
Could I set it up to only keep 1 full backup per month and weekly incremental, no consolidation?
I would need to reduce the have to reduce the size of my back up to say 400MB to have enough room on my 1TB disk though.
What effect will reducing the size of the backup have? Does it just take longer because the program has to compress the data more?

To me, deleting the files before your backup is not a good idea as after the delete, you have no backup to recover to.

If you have familiy photos and the like, it is importatnt that you have secondary backups. Do hou have a DVD burner. Can you make copies of some of your stuff onto several DVD's so you have multiple copies of your phoitos,etc.

One option would be to make a new storage folder(s) (maybe named storage) staight off the main directory tree.
Move some of your large files into this storage folder and then you the "exclude" option to exclude this entire folder from the backup. This would reduce the size of your backup by about the size of the folder. Your backup of the storage folder would be the multiple copies of the DVD.

Ths procedure would enable you to keep 1 full with several incrementals and room enough for the next full to be created before the first full was deleted.

Even this is not a good procedure. Multiple backups on different disk is a better choice. A 2TB disk costs about $75.