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Hopefully a simple question

Thread solved

Regarding Cyber Protect Home Office

I'm reviewing system backups, currently have been running with Scheme: Incremental Scheme, Method Incremental.

Full version every 5 incremental versions

Delete version chains older than 7 days.

Question- should I suffer a drive failure, can my entire system be restored from these backups?

If not, what strategy should I be using?

Thanks. 

0 Users found this helpful

William, welcome to these public User Forums.

The simple answer to your question is Yes.  As always there are caveats to the answer!

  1. Make sure that you have created the Acronis rescue media to use in such a scenario.  If your drive has failed, then you will need to boot your PC from the rescue media in order to do the recovery.
     
  2. It is very important to never attempt to move or delete any of the backup files created by ACPHO outside of the tools provided by the application itself, i.e. using either the automatic cleanup options for the backup task, or else the Clean up versions tool provided with each task (from the task menu).  Any actions taken outside of ACPHO using such as Explorer can & probably will cause corruption of the backup files due to the use of metadata and database tracking.

KB 59877: Acronis True Image: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media

KB 69472: Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office: how to create bootable media

KB 69427: Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office: How to restore your computer with WinPE-based or WinRE-based media

KB 61844: Acronis True Image 2019, 2020 and 2021: How to delete old backups

Automatic cleanup

There can be lots of confusion around the topic of automatic cleanup which can be better understood if some basic concepts are known!

First:  automatic cleanup only works on complete(d) versions / version chains.  Do not expect individual elements of version chains to be cleaned up, such as incremental or differential files!

Second: automatic cleanup only runs after a new Full backup for the next version / version chain has been created successfully.  This means that there must be sufficient free space available on the storage drive / location to hold a new Full backup image file!

Third: counting of days does not start until after a new Full backup file has been created when using the option to ‘Delete versions / version chains older than X days.’  It does not start for the active backup version / version chain before that point!

Fourth: the simplest & easiest automatic cleanup option to use & understand is to ‘Store no more than X recent versions / version chains.’  The criteria here means that if you set X = 2, then when the X+1 (3rd) version / version chain is created successfully with a new Full backup file, then the oldest version / version chain will be deleted by automatic cleanup.

Example:

Incremental backup task, using Full plus 5 Incremental backups before next new Full backup.

Task scheduled to run daily with automatic cleanup set to ‘Store no more than 2 version chains.’

Day 1 – Full backup created.

Days 2 – 6 Incremental backups created.

Day 7 – Next new Full backup created. 

Days 8 – 12 Incremental backups created.

Day 13 – Next new Full backup created.  Automatic cleanup deletes files created on days 1 – 6.

If the same task used ‘Delete version chains older than 7 days’, then those 7 days wouldn’t start counting until day 7 for the first set of files (version chain 1) and not until day 13 for the second set etc.  So automatic cleanup wouldn’t delete the oldest chain until day 14 in the above example.