Skip to main content

Daily Incremental (Single File Only)

Thread needs solution

Our environment's use for Acronis is the ability to rapidly recover computers (server & workstation) quickly.  All our our backups are stored on-premise to network storage. We have traditionally used grandfather, father, son, and Tower of Hanoi schemes, but for 60+ devices the number of managed tasks and cleanup tasks gets difficult to manage, including the large number of resultant archive files.

We are considering the new feature within v.12.5 of Single File Daily Incremental backups, and whether they would be a good fit for our needs.  I understand that this method creates a single full backup and the following incremental backups are written to the same file.  Is this method reliable enough for our needs?  Some of our concerns regarding this method:

  • If only a single file is used, can it be corrupted by an incremental backup and rendered useless? If no other full backups exist, this could be catastrophic.
  • Is there a scheme when using this method to overwrite the initial archive or does it perpetually add incrementals to the original backup archive?.  How retention is managed is a bit confusing to me.

Any assistance is appreciated.  We are moving to 12.5 from 10 and I want to get the details sorted out before I deploy in mass.

Thanks!

 

0 Users found this helpful
frestogaslorastaswastavewroviwroclolacorashibushurutraciwrubrishabenichikucrijorejenufrilomuwrigaslowrikejawrachosleratiswurelaseriprouobrunoviswosuthitribrepakotritopislivadrauibretisetewrapenuwrapi
Posts: 22
Comments: 3800

Hi,

The single file backups can be corrupted just like any other backup files, even though there are special techniques used in this backup format which prevent corruption (for example simple failed incrementals won't break the entire archive), there is no guarantee that archive will remain valid forever. The main recommendation here is to always keep at least 2 copies of the backups, e.g. use backup replication feature (2nd destination) where backups are replicated to another location - offsite or cloud would be the best choices.

There is no scheme to always overwrite the backup, but you can use "always full" backup scheme with pre-command which will remove the current full backup files from the location before the backup (this will effectively always keep a single full backup in the location).

The retention within single-file backups is implemented by cleaning up space within this backup file and re-using it for next backups, so the archive file won't grow indefinitely. You can check the details here.

Thank you.