Using multiple USB HDD to store rotatable backups
I saw a similar question asked before from 2017 on this idea, but didn't see an appropriate answer the would apply in 2021 to the Cyber Protect Home Office product.
I want to create local backup weekly of my laptop which has a 2T SSD. My idea is to purchase 4 2T USB HDD, take Full backups to a drive, then the next week use a different USB drive, and so on - maintaining 4 weeks of backups and then rotating the oldest. Very much like back in the day when we used tape. I think this would be a more reliable solution for me than saving all the backups tp a single large HDD that could fail. Each drive would be created to be bootable with the recovery tools. Essentially creating a self contained backup disk.
Do I need to create a backup plan for each USB HDD or can the one suffice? I think when it is time to rotate the HDD I would format it to make it clean, much like erasing a tape.
Does this scenario make sense? Am I over thinking it? Would the Acronis software be able to handle this? Is there a simpler way to do this?
Michael,
I note that your plan indicates that you desire to have manual control over your backup plan rather than use s scheduled approach and part of that plan is to format your target disks at each rotation time. This format step can be avoided by using task settings suitable for your plan. Additionally, I believe you risk the possibility of having to recreate the backup task itself after formatting the target disk due to the fact that Windows may assign a new GUID to the disk during that process. The Acronis application uses this GUID in its tracking methods.
Because there is nothing said really in the linked KB that Steve provided what I would recommend is that you setup the backup task Options as follows:
- Schedule: Set to Do not schedule
- Backup scheme: Set to Single version scheme
- Backup method: Set to Full
These settings will result in a task which will only run when manually invoked, only create a single version on disk, and only create Full disk backup versions.
In addition, these settings will allow you not format your disks at each rotation and minimize the total backup size created on disk. Keep in mind here you will need to have enough space on your target disks to accommodate 2 full backups due to the fact that the application will create a new backup prior to deleting the prior backup file from the disk.
See the documentation linked below: