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Moving ONE full .tibx backup to new location? What about a .tib folder backup?

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ACPHO, fully updated. I am doing full drive backups (tibx) monthly. I want to move ONE (the oldest) full backup in my set to a new location and remove it from the current backup destination drive (to free up some space), and be able to restore files from that old backup. My understanding is that manually moving a .tibx file (and later "add existing backup" with it) is not going to work, all the tibx files need to stay together. Is this possible?

Would it just be easier to export it as a .vhdx that I can archive away on an old HD and mount and pull files from? I'm on Windows 11. I will never need to do a full restore with that old backup, I only need access to the files in it.

I also have folder-based backups (.tib) which may be a different story? I can't export those as .vhd... Can I manually copy a single tib file to a new location (an external hard drive), delete it using "clean up" UI from the normal backup destination, and be able to open it in some way to restore individual files if needed? Or... simply restore that backup to an external HD and call it good? I'd much prefer them in one simple file like a .tib that I can pull files from later...

The obvious answer here is "replace your backup with a bigger hard drive" which yeah, someday soon I will do that but... in the mean time I'm really tight on space. And why clog my HD with a huge, old backup I will most like never need?

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Eric, unfortunately this is an issue that is no longer easy since the introduction of TIBX files with their dependencies with each other and use of metadata.

There is no obvious method of doing what you ask to separate a single full backup file from an existing chain of files.  Attempting to do so will likely result in the separate file being reported as being corrupt and the remaining files in the chain likewise as corrupt!

Besides the obvious answer of upgrading your backup drive to a larger size, then the alternative answer(s) are convoluted at least.

The approach that you can try, assuming that you have a spare storage drive of sufficient size would be:

Copy the complete backup set to the spare storage drive as is.

If you have another PC with ACPHO installed, you could try connecting the spare storage drive to that PC and use the 'Add existing backup' option to import the backup files into ACPHO on that PC, then use the Clean up versions tool to remove all files except the one you want to have as a separate file.  Note: because you have a chain of files, you will probably still have 2 files present on the drive, one being a 12KB metadata TIBX file that should be retained along with the full backup file.

If you don't have another PC for the above method, then this is where it gets more convoluted because you would need to remove the current Backup task from ACPHO without deleting any of its files, disconnect the main storage drive, then do the earlier action from the spare storage drive connected to the original PC.  When all done, then repeat the task delete and reattach the original storage drive, add back the backup task files, clean up the unwanted full backup using the tool....

Didn't even think of that trick copying to a 2nd pc then cleaning up the backups I don't want. I'll keep that in my back pocket for the future, thank you!

I think I have a solution for my particular situation that would work. I figured out that I can mount the tib files as a virtual hard drive (when ACPHO is installed so that windows recognizes them and auto-mounts them), even from an external drive. I assume this only works for a full backup (not an incremental chain), which is what I have. Just a simple separate full backup.

For full backup tibx files I can export them as a virtual hard drive. Both are so easy to mount.

The drawback is that the files inside each virtual drive are not indexed in any way so searching widely for files if you don't know where they are can take a LONG time, unlike searching from within ACPHO itself. But the ease of making a one-off backup of an exported VHD or .tib file is really nice.

In the mean time I ordered a replacement hard drive :)