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Scheduling exactly when a full backup occurs in an incremental backup scheme

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I'm just reviewing Acronis vmProtect 8 and experimenting with options. Having a full backup occur every night is excessive in that the system would end up backing up continuously. The following combination works well for the system context except there is no control over when the full backups occur.
a) Backups in separate files.
b) Create a Full backup if existing incremental backups are older than 7 days.
c) Automatically delete old backups using the Simple Scheme and their older than X days

The preference is to be able to schedule which day of the week a full backup is performed on a per VM basis rather than leaving it to a rotating cycle which relies on the dates of the existing backup files. Its difficult to then spread the full backups of different virtual machines across different days of the week.

Can I create two separate tasks which have the same settings and backup destination but differ only in the number of days before a full backup is performed?
Can multiple tasks co-exist with the same backup destination and archive file names and not clash with each other? i.e. work with the same backup file set.
Is there any other way to control exactly which day of the week full backups occur?

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Posts: 22
Comments: 3800

Hi Apolon,

It is possible to create 2 tasks writing data into the same archive, however the retention options and "how often to create full" settings will be taking into account the current state of the archive at the moment of task execution, so if your 1st task is configured to create full after each 3rd backup and the 2nd task is configured to create full after each 4th backup, then the 2nd task will never do the full, since the criteria will not be met. This of course is true assuming that both tasks are not running at the same time (or you'll get write conflict). This info I believe answers your first 2 questions.

Concerning the 3rd question, there are currenly only side factors which you can trigger to control the full backup creation: you can schedule tasks at different days so that they begin their cycles at different days and thus the 1st full for each of these tasks will be created at different days. This may not be really straight-forward, but I believe will do the trick for you. In general there are 2 ways to control the full backup creation: basing on the number of backups in archive (number of recovery points) or basing on the age of the backups (when backups become older than X days).

Hope this helps!

Thank you.
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Best regards,
Vasily
Acronis vmProtect Program Manager