Acronis Backup 12.5 Advanced: Cleanup Rules and Consolidation
Hello,
I'm Andrea. Can someone please explain me how the Cleanup Rules and Backup Consolidation work together?
This is my situation in details:
I work on a office with other 7 colleagues and we all have Acronis Backup 12.5 Advanced installed. Our backups are stored on a server with limited space (900Gb) so it's important that we don't use all this space.
For that reason i created a backup plan for every computer
and then i set this Cleanup Rules:
I thought that with this setting, no backup collection would exceed 110GB and that was perfect (8 computer x 110Gb MAX= 880Gb MAX).
In Addition i set this Consolidation rules on every plan:
The problem is that the "limit" I set at 110Gb seems to be not respected and i found some locations that contains 130Gb-150Gb of backup data. For example:
In this example there are 3 full backup of the past week with all of their incremental backup and neither cleaning nor consolidation have been applied
Is there any wrong configuration to correct to make sure that the space dedicated to the backups of each single computer is limited to 110Gb?
Thanks in advance for your help, it will be really appreciated! I have tried everything in recent months to make everything work unsuccessfully..
Andrea Lenzi

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Hello Maria,
Thanks for your kind answer! You clarified some doubts but I still have some points that I don't understand.
This is the actual situation of my backups after the execution plan of yesterday (the plan rules are exactly the same I showed you in my previous post):
- February 17: FULL BACKUP (68 Gb)
- February 18: NO BACKUP (i was out of office)
- February 19: FULL BACKUP (64Gb)
- February 20: INCREMENTAL BACKUP (4Gb - linked to February 19 full backup)
TOTAL SPACE: 136Gb
The situation that I expected to find, having set the limit to 110gb, was the following:
- February 19: FULL BACKUP (64Gb)
- February 20: INCREMENTAL BACKUP (4Gb - linked to February 19 full backup)
In other words, I expected that the full backup of February 17th would be canceled because the maximum allowed size (110Gb) had been exceeded. In fact, it should have already been canceled on February 19 after the new full backup because the 110Gb limit had been exceeded
Unfortunately the full backup of February 17th is still here. In your answer you told me that Acronis limits space deleting and consolidating incremental backups, but when Acronis is able to delete a full backup? what are the conditions to make it happen? Why the full backup of February 17th (with no incremental backup linked to it) it's still here?
I take this opportunity to ask you one last question: in your opinion, with space limit set to 110Gb and the average weight of a full backup that stands around 50-60Gb, do you recommend leaving the option to consolidate backups enabled or to disable it? Our biggest problem is the limited space (900Gb), so all our efforts must be concentrated to try not to occupy all this space.
Thank you very much for your patience!
Andrea
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Hello Andrea.
Thanks for sharing additional details on the situaion.
I take this opportunity to ask you one last question: in your opinion, with space limit set to 110Gb and the average weight of a full backup that stands around 50-60Gb, do you recommend leaving the option to consolidate backups enabled or to disable it? O
I would recommend that you disable consolidation and select Always incremental (single-file) backup scheme which will create only 1 full backup and will add incrementals to it. In this case, you will be able to keep "By total size of backup" cleanup rule.
Please also read more on this backup scheme here: https://forum.acronis.com/search?search=always+incremental
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Hello Maria,
Thanks for your answer and your suggestion.
I've just tried to create a new backup plan selectin "Always incremental (single-file backup scheme)". There are two things that i had to change because of this new configuration:
- What to backup: "Entire Machine" is no longer available with "Always incremental", i had to select "Specify disk and volumes" and i selected the entire disk: can you please confirm me that this option doesn't change the steps necessary to recover an entire machine, in case of emergency? I forgot to specify it but our plans were set up to back up the "Entire Machine" and I made recovery tests with this settings
- Cleanup rule "By total size of backup" - it's not a huge problem, I've selected "By number of backups".
Thank you so much for your patience,
Have a good day!
Andrea
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Hello Andrea.
I was not able to reproduce the situation when changing backup method to Always incremental would not allow to select the Entire machine in What to back up.
Could you please export this backup plan into a .json file and share it here for analysis?
Technically, there is no significant difference in Entire machine and Disk/volume backups (if there all all disk/volumes are selected on this machine).
I also recommend that you keep this KB article with recovery instructions handy: https://kb.acronis.com/content/35681
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Hello Maria,
Thanks again for your patience :)
Here you can find the required file. As anticipated, this is absolutely not a problem, especially if the "Entire Machine" option is similar to the "Disks Selection" (with all disks selected). I also found this indication on the guide in the link you gave to me:
I'm currently testing the solution you suggested to me and I think it's good for our purpose.
Andrea
Attachment | Size |
---|---|
531013-179975.tar | 15 KB |
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Hello Andrea.
What are the testing results?
There is no restriction for the entire machine backup for always-incremental backups.
As for the disk-level backup on your screenshot from a guide (any disk-level backup is a backup that contains a sector-based copy of a disk or a volume in a packaged form), it is stated there as an opposite to a file-level backup. An entire machine backup is a disk-level backup of all disks in a machine.
I have reviewed your backup plan and can recommend increasing the compression level for storage saving purposes.
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Hello Maria!
Please note that the software limits space occupied in a backup location by deleting and consolidating incremental backups
What happens if only full backups are made, and just one full doesn't exceed the storage limit, but two does? Does the first one get deleted, or will the backup fail?
-- Peter
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Hello Peter,
thank you for this question!
What happens if only full backups are made, and just one full doesn't exceed the storage limit, but two does? Does the first one get deleted, or will the backup fail?
This backup will not fail. It will be created and consolidated or deleted later when retention rules will have worked.
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