Incremental BackUp not removing old backups.
I'm wondering if the Incremental BackUp does not remove old files.
My current incremental backup is set to remove backups that are older than one week but has never removed any backups. Instead of having one week of backups, I have several months. My archive has become quite large.
Are the incremental backups dependent on one another and therefore not able to be removed?
Hi ACP,
If you are only running incremental backups and never running a full or differential backup you will find it’s not possible to remove older incremental backups. The reason for this is Incremental backups are like a chain, the last backup always requires the previous backups. If you remove one of your older incremental backups you will find you will not have a complete chain and this will render your backups unsafe/useless to recover from!
A few options you can look into is performing a weekly Differential backup, this will create a backup of changes since your last Full backup, so all previous incremental backups will no longer be required (if set by your retention rules) and will be cleaned up.
The other option you can look at is using the consolidation rule, for example after 1 week consolidate my backups, what this will essentially do is ‘create’ a virtual full backup based on the last full backup and the incremental that needs to be removed. The issue with this method is it can be disk intensive as it needs to read the full backup and the incremental and then write a new full backup... so using the differential method above might be better for your needs.
Alternatively what many customers do is perform a full system backup on Friday night as they have the weekend for it to run (if the extra time is needed) and incremental backups during the week.
Hopefully some of those options and details help explain things a little better, all the best and hope you get it sorted.
I'm new to Acronis. I have True Image 2014. I'm a household user, not business. I have a second drive in my HP CPU which is one Terabyte split into two partitions. After a few weeks of backup says he's full up. I thought of deleting the first backup, but realize that would be a problem. Also see that deleting incremental backups would be a problem.
So, I'm thinking the thing to do is delete all the backups, do a full backup, do the incremental weekly, till full again, then repeat.
So, I guess my question is that I just use the standard "Delete" option? Or is there a more preferred method to clean out the old backup and incremental backups?
TIA
Alan, you have asked my question for me. Same problem here. I am using an external HD, 1TB, and it is getting full faster than I'd like. What happens when it's full? Does it clean the drive and start over? If I do a full back up every other week does it delete the older backup or do I do it after new backup?
HI ther I have been trying for 6 moths to simply do what your last suggestion said. That is a weekly full backup and 6 more incremental. This is my ideal and what I want to achieve.
I go edit settings / options/ set daily back up, switch to back up scheme
next select Differential scheme on the top half
tick "create full back up after 6 days" on the bottom half
Click OK and save. It accepts all of these without comment and yet
if I repeat the above the above the create full back up as not been saved
I have also tried "turn on automatic clean up "( I have 2 TB of storeage and 200 G of data) but set it to 3
The thing still carries on a simple differential back up day in day out.
I deleted the whole lot and set it up again about 5 times to date.
I am a bit paranoid about my data, twin raid drives, external back up device and some cloud cover.
However I am looking for something else at present but feel conned as I paid for this and it just does not work.