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Ture Image 2013 (Latest Build) backup offsite using two USB drives.

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Hi

I have a Windows 7 Computer with Acronis True Image 2013, latest build, installed.

I have two 1TB external USB drives.

Our broadband is to slow to use the offsite cloud option as a viable backup solution.

I'm looking to setup an alternating backup, with Week 1 going to USB Drive A and then swapping the drive so I can store drive A elsewhere and the use drive B for week 2 and then back to drive A on week 3 and so on. Thus always having one drive 'offsite'.
I have tried numerous combinations of full backups on Monday with incremental, full backups on Monday with differentials, just full backups each day. With the automatic cleanup of store no more than 5 copies.

However when I swap the drive the next backup always reports an error, such as:

Brookway_Windows7 Task is waiting for user interaction.
Description: Stage Description
Information: Failed to open backup Z:\Acronis\Brookway_Windows7_full_b1_s1_v1.tib. Make sure the backup location is accessible and contains all versions of the backup. This backup may also be corrupted.
Details: Click Retry to try to read from the same location. Otherwise, click Cancel to cancel the operation.

How do you do rotating or alternating backups to multiple drives so you can have offsite copies.

Thanks

Dominick

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Hi Dominick,
I think you are pretty close to getting on a schedule that works for you and the software. Based on the information you provided, it seems like your retention settings may not coincide with the current schedule. Acronis will not delete a previous back up (or back up set) up until it has at least one new full image. Once it does, a previous back up can be automatically deleted based on retention or quotas. The software must have access to the first full back up in the chain so it can delete.

Try giving yourself one additional day of overlap and I believe you will see the software operate as expected. Or, you can change your retention settings to match when the weekly swap occurs. Either way, the error indicates that the database is looking for a previous back up set which is not available, and thus will not delete based on your current settings/schedule.

I doubt corruption is the cause, but of course this could also cause an error like the one you referenced if a back up image could not be read.

While there is no way to totally automatic what you want to do, there may be some alternatives.

You are faced with two major problems. First, when the backup task is first created, the program records disk informtiion such as disk id on both source and target so the insertion of the other disk is a "no match" situation.

Also, the program works from a database and has a record of the actual *.tib file names so when you inset the unexpected disk, it finds no match to the expected files.

Those are the things we have to work around.
Questions:
1. What is your preference for backups. All fulls, or Full with inc, or full with dif.
2. When is the disk switch made? Before or after the backup?
3. Which day do you want the full to occcur.?
3a. Is the backup performed by schedule or manually?
4. Are the backups performed daily or with what frequency?
5. Is there days when no backups would be created (holidays, etc) so the number of backups would be less than normal?
6. Is it possible for the switch to be occasionally delayed for one week due to holidays, etc so number of backups might occasionally be twice as many or go for an extra week?
7. How many weeks backups do you intended to store on each disk?

Those would be some starting questions.