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Replication Questions

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I have one task which creates a survival backup on an external hard drive. This task runs once a week. I decided to to create a replica in my cloud storage, so I selected the replica tab and clicked replicate.  This activity has raised a couple of questions that I haven't been able to find answers to, namely:

 

The replica task has run for a few weeks now but despite setting to only maintain 2 versions I am now running out of my 500GB cloud space. I have carried out a clean up and removed a replica, but it says that the 1 remaining replica is taking up almost the whole 500GB despite the fact that the uncompressed drives that are being backed up total only about 240GB. Any ideas why my replica is reported as being so big? I have tried to find a way to delete everything from my cloud space but that appears not to be an option. If you select 0 on the number of backups to maintain during clean up, it defaults to 1. Is there a way to completely clear the cloud and start again?

 

I also tried to find a way to turn off replication and there does not seem to be an option to do this. I thought by selecting 0 for the number of replica versions on the options, advanced tab that it would stop creating replicas, but again this value defaults to a minimum of 1 so once initiated it seems that you are stuck with replication. Is there a way to stop replicating a backup?

 

TIA for any assistance.

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You should have an option in the main Acronis GUI for your Backup task with the replica to allow you to remove the replica.

See the ACPHO User Manual section here:

Deleting an entire backup replica

You can delete a replica with its original backup or separately. To delete it with the backup, delete the backup in the way described above.

To delete a replica without deleting the backup, in the Backup section, click the down arrow icon next to the backup with the replica to delete, and then click Delete replica.

I tried replication when it was first introduced and gave up on using almost immediately because it has no advantage over creating a normal backup to the Acronis Cloud.

Replication follows the local backup scheme, so if you have this set to store say 2 backup version chain with a full and 5 incremental backups in each chain, then this is what is going to get uploaded to the cloud for the replica too.

This is totally different to have a normal backup to the cloud where the Full backup is only uploaded once and thereafter a hybrid delta / incremental backup is used to only upload changed data with no further full uploads etc.

For me, replication would only be useful if it was allowed to go to my NAS etc.

As always thanks for your prompt reply Steve.

 

I looked everywhere (except there) for an option to stop and delete replication, so thanks for pointing me to it.

 

Steve Smith wrote:

I tried replication when it was first introduced and gave up on using almost immediately because it has no advantage over creating a normal backup to the Acronis Cloud. 

I do see an advantage to making a replica to the cloud, and that is that other scheduled backup tasks can continue. In my case the upload speed means a cloud backup takes a day or 2 and so a regular backup to the cloud prevents my other daily tasks.

 

David

David, once the initial full backup to the cloud (for a direct cloud backup) has completed, then it will perform a whole lot quicker than any replication as that will always be larger.

One of the big issues with replication is that periodically a full backup is made to the cloud, which can take a long time and eats up available storage (as I found out during beta testing of creating Replica).

Ian