Migrating USB drives and incrimental backups
Greetings all,
I have a USB based external Seagate GoFlex 1TB drive. I have sensitive data on it, which I would like to protect at all times.
I understand that I can do a base backup and then subsequent incremental backups for the rest of the week, then repeat the cycle.
However, this drive is used in other computers also which do not have acronis installed.
When I bring back my driver after using it in the other computer, will acronix be able to handle this scenario? Or would my incrementals be corrupt and lack changes made in the other machine?
Thanks
AB
IF you change what's on the disk (add or delete files while connected to this or that computer, then the next backup will record those changes, whther it's a full or incremental backup. An incremental backup will make an incremental file that includes all the sectors that have changed since the last backup was made.
Thanks Scott!
This means ATI is capable of tracking canges made to a disk even when it is connected to a computer that doesnt have ATI on it. This is indeed a good feature.
BAsically, greatly oversimplifying, ati backs up all the sectors in use, for each incremental it then backs up the sectors that have been written to since the last backup was made.
BAsically, greatly oversimplifying, ati backs up all the sectors in use, for each incremental it then backs up the sectors that have been written to since the last backup was made.
but then there could be a sector/cluster already marked in the NTFS bitmap and the same being modified. in that case one actually needs to compare the contents of those sectors/clusters.
It doesn't do that. You have dated sectors in the backup and dated sectors on the disk drive. If the drive date is later, ati inlcudes it as one that needs to be backed up. It's possible that you write to the sector exaclty what was already in it (some defraggers do this) and ati wil pick it up as a sector that's been written to. This is why it's advisable not to run a defragger before doing inc backups.
You have dated sectors in the backup and dated sectors on the disk drive.
You mean there is a date stamp associated with the NTFS bitmap somewhere? Is there any documentation explaining this more in detail. Or you can PM me too if you wish. I would love to know more about the dating mechanism, 'if' is is not a trade secret.
There's a last accessed, last modified, etc. date associated with every file under ntfs; it's part of the ntfs metadata for a file-- if a file has such and such a date, then the cluster and sectors that make up the file thereby have the same date.
i dont mean to knit pick here, and you have been trying to help me with answers all along, but by going the file times route, you will get all clusters for that file. For larger files that could be a huge amount of data to be scanned.
But it is godo to know that Acronis can handle this, and I can safely use it for my scenario.
Thanks a ton Scott.
ATI does not "track" changes. There is no ongoing monitoring occurring. When you do a full disk backup, ATI simply takes an image of the current state of the disk and saves that as a compressed .tib file to wherever you chose as backup location.
When doing an incremental or differential image, ATI compares the image to the earlier image, and saves just the changes. The comparison occurs at that time of backup, not because of any real-time monitoring.
There are diff ways detecting what's changed could be done, even going back to using the old and unreliable Archive Bit in file attributes. Diff methods have their good an bad points.
Using the dates from the file system is elegant in its own way. It might capture too much in some cases, which can waste some time and resources but it ptrotects against capturing too little, which would be devasting from a data-integrity point of view. I've probably butchered what is a complicated set of processes but it's the basic--compare now to then, copy the stuff that is changed or appeasr to have changed.
Tuttle, Scott,
thank you for trying to resolve my doubts. I have used Symantec BESR and it does something called 'Reconcile', which sounds similar in technique to was has been described above and it is SLLLLOOOOOWWWWWW!!!!!!! But BESR also does 'tracking' and only resolves to reconcile if that context is somehow lost.
So is what you describe similar to that?
I know nothing about BESR and its tracking. I use ATI because it works and has helped me save many friends from disaster.
There's no tracking.
You can choose the inc you want and it will restore up through that inc.