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Acronis won't restore because it can't find "version 1"

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I'm recalling from memory, so hope I can discribe this issue properly.  I use Acronis to do full backups to a USB hard drive.  I set up the first of several backups using the menu structure of this application.  Backups accumulate on the hard drive and don't go away until I delete them for lack of space.  Howevr, if I delete the oldest backup in a group, when I test whether or not I can recover my HD, I get an error message "can't find version 1...".  

Seems like, if I remove the oldest backup, this "no version 1" problem pops up and I have to create another backup in order to be guaranteed a successful recovery.  So, right now, I have two backup groups listed on my backup page.  Looks like if I want to delete one item from the older backup group, I have to delete the whole group and start another one.  This is a work-a-round, but I don't undrstand why the "version 1" bugaboo.  I just want to pile one backup after another into one group and to be able to delete older unneeded backups without being faced with this complication.   

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Ron, what sort of backups are you creating here? Full backups only, Incremental or Differential backups?

If you are only ever creating Full backups then you should not see the version 1 missing issue as each backup is complete of itself.

However, if you are creating Incremental backups, then you are creating a version chain that must consist of the initial Full backup plus all incremental backups based on that initial full backup.  In this case if you delete the Full backup then the whole version chain is invalidated as the incrementals cannot stand on their own.  The same if you delete any of the incrementals leaving later ones.

If you are creating Differential backups, then like incrementals, the initial Full backup must always be there but for differentials you can delete any unwanted differential backups as each such backup contains all changes made since the initial full backup was created.

One of the easist, though not necessarily the shortest ways of testing your backup versions, is to perform a validation of the backup task that created them, especially after manually deleting any backups.  Validation will report an error for any required missing backups and give you an option to Ignore any that can be ignored whilst keeping the backup as being usable for a restore / recovery.