Full/Differential/incremental backups to different disks
Trying to set up a backup job using a esata attached disk dock and a couple of disks I run into a problem that I feel should be easily handled but that I can't just find how to do.
My backup job consists of mostly pictures and edited/unedited video that I don't wish to lose and most of it rarely if ever change but a full backup is "large", a bit over 2.5tb in size, thus I wish to do the full backup to a 4tb disk that is then removed and stored at another location until I deem it time for a new full backup or it is needed for disaster recovery. After a full backup I then swap in cheap 1tb disks for differential / incremental.
My problem is that I can't figure out how to get the program to not try to make a new full backup (that will not fit on the disk) but just do a differential or incremental against the now unavailable full backup.
This feels like a very fundamental requirement but I can't figure out how to configure it.
So if I understand it correctly this product is incapable of handling what I deem one of the most fundamental aspects of backups, being offline and safe.
How on earth do you handle backup to tape? Am I to presume you can only do full backups to tape as well? Ever thought of dropping the metadata into something more suitable then the backup archive alone? I seriously hope you get your act together and solve this basic lack of functionality since without it disk backups are mostly useless.
For tapes it's possible to run incremental backup without tape with the full, because this information is stored locally on the hard disk of the machine where tape is attached.
So what you are saying is that you already have the code infrastructure to handle this, yet don't use it and therefore turn a otherwise nice product into crap on purpose?
Yes, I ran into this same issue when I first started using the product. I worked around this by basically having double the storage.
1 large drive onsite to house Full, Differential and Incremental.
1 large drive offsite to house a copy of the original Full backup.
3 smaller drives to rotate and house copies of all Differential, Incremental and updated catalog. This can be paired with the offsite drive for disaster recovery.
It's not pretty and it requires a script to copy over Differential, Incremental and Catalog files to the rotating disks.
I'm in agreement that a catalog should be all you need to run proceeding Differential and Incremental jobs not the entire archive. Unfortunately that's not the case as far as I know.
Has any of the Acronis versions since 2014 addressed the problem of having to keep a full backup online to do a Differential / Incremental ?
Hi! The logic hasn't been changed over versions. You'd still need access to the dependent backups.