Deleted files and incremental backup

an incr file is a link in a chain of files.
the full backup is the first link lets say this occured Monday
the next incr is the 2nd link lets assume you did this backup on Tuesday
the next incr is the 3rd link lets assume you did this backup on Wednesday
the next incr is the 4th link lets assume you did this backup on Thursday
the next incr is the 5th link lets assume you did this backup on friday

the advantage of the above system is you can restore any file as it looked on any of the above days.
So lets assume on Thursday you changed a bunch of files and even deleted entire folders.
every single disk block that changed will be in the friday incr.

its now Saturday and you say hey wait a minute I need a few of those files as the existed on thursday morning even though I changed (or deleted) them thursday afternoon.

to do any restore with incr files you need the FULL and all the intervening incr files.
in this example thats the monday, tues and wednesday .tib files.

under these conditions your backup does NOT shrink when you delete files on drives D & E.
and you will run out of room.

I THINK a google search for freeware karens replicator is more what you are looking for.

Thanks for explaining. I actually think I want both. I want to keep both kinds of backups on critical data. I just looked at Karen's Replicator and it does want I want. But I also like Acronis.

What is normally done with an incremental backup when the target disk is full? Just delete the backups and start from scratch? ?r switch to another target disk for a period of time and then delete the data from the original target disk, swithing from disk to disk over a period of time?

what you do is up to your tolerance for risk and the amount of freespace disk on other disks you have.
since you can get a 1 Terabyte drive with a 5 yr warranty for about $150 one finds that disk space often is not a insurmountable issue.

but eventually you need some kind of backup rotation scheme

for my critical data to me I run two lines of backups full/incr on split schedules.
EX:
line_a does a full on the 1st_sun of the month then daily incr
line_b does a full on the 3rd_sun of the month then daily incr
Line_a and line_b are on different target devices such as one being a external usb drive and the other being a network drive.

TI home will not run two jobs at the same instant but will queue them so then run seqentially.
I schedule one 2:01 am and the other a minute later 2:02am they run one after the other.
Ideally my target devices are big enough to store 1 generation of history.
(current full+30 days of incr plus last months full and its 30 days of incr)
I have mine send email when the full backup occurs and if any incr fails.
So day in day out the sun comes up the sun goes down and oh yeah, backups occur.
Usually incr backups finish in mear minutes a full however takes hours.
this is why I schedule fulls to occur on 2am sunday with each line doing its full on a different sunday.

The advantage of two lines is the risk of both lines failing on the same day is the square of risk for one drive failing. Ex. if you accept the figure that on any given day a hard drive has a 1 in 1000 chance of failing then then chance of two independant drives both failing on the same day is 1/1000 * 1/1000 = 1 in a million.
by having two lines each with 1 generation of history you are guaranteed with 999999/1000000 certainty that you can recover any file as it looked in the last 30 days and with 999/1000 certainty any file as it looked in the last 45.

The above is just one example of a backup rotation everyone has their own preference.
you probably will find chain2gen (below) exactly what you need to accomplish these backup rotations (generations) for TI_HOME.

http://forum.acronis.com/forum/5940

Thanks for your very detailed answers and help!

What I decided to do was this:

I'll use Karen's at the end of each day to produce an identical copy of my "current Jobs" folder on an external eSATA drive. This gives me two copies of all of my critical files, it deletes, updates with new files, etc. Drive capacity is 2TB for both the souce and backup drive so I'm not going to run out of space as I manage what's in my 'current jobs' folder.

I'll use Acronis to do a full backup on another 2 TB drive followed by inci backups a few times a week. When the disk gets close to full I'll do a full backup to another 2TB drive. When that gets full I'll reformat the first drive and start the process again there.

Altogether this will give me 3 disks with all of my essential files - and with minimal work.

Prior to this I have been dragging and dropping folders with 40GB of data, a folder at a time. Acronis and Karen Rep will be huge time savers for me.

great ideas.
I would schedule both actions to occur automatically at night/off hours.
if something occurs automatcially it will get done, if I need to manually remember then I might forget.

I would probably write a script and schedule to run daily
that would monitor the freespace on the target drive and
send email or throw a popup dialog box up when it gets low.

that way you do "nothing" until one day you walk in and your computer says time switch backup devices as this one is low...

something along the lines of

freecheck.vbs
----------------------
Dim WshShell, BtnCode, ArgObj, p1, p2, p3, p4, p5,cmsg
Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _
& "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
Set colDisks = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
("Select * from Win32_LogicalDisk Where DeviceID = 'Z:'")

for Each objDisk in colDisks
min_gigfree = 100
actual_free = round(objDisk.FreeSpace/(1024*1024*1024),1)
diff = actual_free - min_gigfree
if diff < 0 then
BtnCode = WshShell.Popup("Time to swap backup drives freespace in gig is "&vbCrLf&actual_free, 0, "Alert", 64)
end if
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