Backup from multiple disks to a number of external hard drives
Hello
I originally posted this on this forum but it was moved to the TruImage forum but I have now been advised to post here to confirm the theory.
I have 6 * 2TB disks attached to my motherboard in my PC.
I am using this PC as an HTPC to store all my films, music and other media. Ideally, I want to put data on all of these disks, using them as separate disks rather than disk-spanning logical volumes. All the disks are set-up as GPT disks and there is no O/S resident on any of the disks.
I then want to backup all these folders spread across the drives to a single USB 2.0 attached external 2TB hard drive.
Let's say that at the end of year 1, my total storage utilisation across the 6 disks is 1.8TB (my external drive being 2TB)
On one of my 6 drives which holds Bluray films, I add a number of big Bluray files (mkv container format) which takes me over the 2TB capacity of my external drive.
I buy another 2TB external drive and plug it into my PC.
Now, I have skimmed the User Guide for Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Workstation which I believe is the product that suits my situation. (Incidentally, if in the future I attached the external drives to a separate PC, does this version allow me to backup across the network as I have a home gigabit network?)
In the User Guide, it mentions BAckup Splitting where there is an AUtomatic setting which basically will try and backup as long as there is space on the target to do the backup. If there isn't, user intervention is required to add more storage or free some up.
This seems to say that what I want is possible. If I run out of disk space on my first 2TB drive, I can plug in another one when Acronis tells me to and it will then start using it.
Could someone be so kind and tell me if this is true?
I realise that there are many other things to consider but this is the crux of how I want the backups to run: my external hard drive to slowly fill up as I add more and more media to my Source drives until I need to add another external hard drive to the PC.
I will have 6 separate volumes (matching the 6 internal disks) set-up on my PC (Win7 64-bit) that I will want backed up incrementally once a week. In Acronis Backup & Recovery, does that mean, I would have 6 corresponding volume images saved into a Vault which happen to reside (until the space runs out) on one external hard drive? If the incrementals then fill up the 1st external hard drive, those 6 volume images are extended onto the 2nd external drive which is now part of the Vault. Again, hopefully, this is how it works?
Help gratefully appreciated.
Thanks for that comment.
That is a bit disappointing if it is completely accurate.
That means that I will have to manually manage my external hard drive to ensure that there is enough space on it for all the different backup volumes + incrementals.
Once I start to run out, I will have to move one or more of my backup volumes to the new external hard drive to balance the space utilisation.
All my drives are 2TB so I can't get a bigger one.
Does anyone have an elegant solution to this requirement?
I've got a customer that has a total of 8 External esata drives. One drive is always connected (the full backup drive) while they swap out differentials every day. What I ended up doing is creating a batch script that runs a few hours before the differential backup runs. What happens is it first deletes everything off the daily drive, then copies the full .tib files and also the .meta folder to the "daily" drive for the Mon-Friday differential backups.
On Saturday (the full backup day) a full backup is created on the "daily drive" and then it will delete everything off the always connected drive, and copy the contents of the full backup onto the full backup drive.
So basically each daily drive has a copy of the full backup, and then just a differential of the day.
Wasn't possible to have a full week of daily and a full week of differentials on one drive, so thats how I managed to get past Acronis's limitation.
That sounds promising. Thanks very much for that feedback.
Based on what you said, is it possible for a full backup to span more than one external drive?
You can't span a backup file (for instance, half of the .tib on one drive and half one the other) however, you can save a full backup to two locations at once by using vaults and also the dual destination features.
If you're worried about backups taking so long (due to the ammount of data, or slow network), do a full backup on friday (so it can also be running through saturday and sunday) then do the little script that copies the friday's full backup and .meta folder over to a daily drive (delete everything off the daily drive beforehand through the script as well), then run a differential mon-thur.
Acronis's compression ration is friggin crazy. I backed up a 2000 server run sql 7 the other day using a boot cd, data was around 80gb uncompressed. Acronis compressed it down to 20gb.
It's a bit late now, but why in the world didn't anyone suggest spanning two external drives? Windows does it, acronis disk director does it, both are already present in the software scenario above. Of course, there are risks to a Raid 0 span, but these risks can be mitigated quite easily. If there is some reason why Acronis cannot write a backup file to a spanned volume, please let us know. Thanks.
Acronis can definitely write image files to spanned/RAID volumes but as you mentioned being a RAID 0 if one disk fails you lose the lot so as a backup it’s not the best solution.
What I would recommend is using a NAS unit (Gigabit attached) and performing your backups to this NAS unit that will be online all the time and give you the option to perform full, incremental, differential or whatever backup settings you like. Allot of NAS units also have the ability to expand your RAID so you can add more storage to them but ensure it can also expand the file system and you don’t have to create a new volume when this is done (most do this now days) but this will solve your backup issues and give you allot more time to spend doing other things than manually swapping HDD’s, having connection issues, risking removing incorrect files..etc..etc.. and you can also run a RAID5 over your backups to protect them from disk failure.
P.S. do not expect much compression at all if you are backing up your media centre compressed movie files... when compressing compressed files you can in fact see very slight increases of required storage space instead of decreases compression normally gives you... But as you will be backing up the entire OS/programs and other files that will allow for some compression but as you add more and more movies your compression ratio will drop close and closer to no compression being achieved (just something to keep in mind)