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Dumb question about how incremental works on Server recovery.

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Not sure if this is the right forum didn't see one for Acronis Server. I just have a question about how incremental backup works.

I have a server, 2 hard drives main one is 150gb backup is 80gb. 27gb are in use right now which will never go over 40. I have my system set to every night do a full backup of the entire hard drive at 3am to the other drive. It's set as incremental. It's been doing it for 50 nights now, but when I check the backup drive, the first file is 24.5GB, Backup2 is 16GB, then Backup3 is 311mb, Backup4 is 292mb, Backup5 is 286mb etc.

It continues around 300mb, but when it hits Backup24 it goes to 1.1GB, then continues around 300mb until Backup47 where it's 1.1GB again.

Just confused what's going on here since it totals 55GB in use, where the main hard drive is only 27GB right now and there's nothing else on the backup drive. Is it not supposed to delete old files or is this normal behavior? Just confused what will happen when the drive is full. Since I told it to backup the entire hard drive, just confused why the backup disk isn't around 27GB all the time...

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Now your backup consists of one full backup (the first) and chain of incrementals. To be able to restore any of the incrementals, it needs the first full and all incrementals before the selected incremental. So you can restore to any day of the last 50. It will not delete old backup (consolidate) if you didn't tell it to do so. Btw, 50 incremental backups (with only one full) if rather long chain - if something happen with one of backup, you won't be able to restore any backup after it - regular (e.g. weekly) full backups recommended.

That makes sense but I don't remember it ever asking me how many I wanted, unless it's hidden somewhere that i'm supposed to change? I don't want that many, is it an option in the backup itself to change how many files it keeps? Seems useless to me that it would do so many.

Yes, you can edit the backup plan to set retention rules to keep only backups newer than N days, and (to reduce length of incremental chain) set up 'custom' backup scheme with separate schedules for incrementals and fulls.