Automatic cleanup not working
I've been having problems with this and I don't understand why. The job keeps failing about 90% through saying 'Target drive is running out of space, delete unnecessary files...' yet i've previously enabled 'Keep the backup no more than 600GB'. When the job begins the backup folder is 550GB in size. The job runs and grows it to 650GB before reporting that the disk is running out of space. I have 3 complete versions in the folder, each with 5 differentials.
Can anyone suggest why Acronis is failing to auto-cleanup older versions to release space? Each full backup version is around 120GB, 168GB is you add the differentials.
Paul, automatic cleanup only works on completed version chains and then runs when a new version chain has been successfully started with a new full backup image, so you need to allow extra space for this.
Ok but it had 3 complete version chains available in addition to the first one which it's been told to keep. Why wouldn't it just delete the oldest of the 3?
That aside though, can you tell me why Acronis reports the total backups size to be 120 GB less than it is in the actual backups folder? However that still doesn't explain its failing to free up space. Just now I kicked off a new backup and clicked ignore to the disk space warnings. It managed to complete with a little room to spare on my disk. So now Acronis reports my total backup size as 645GB, I have 5 complete chains numbered 1 to 5 and still it hasn't deleted any. The limit is set to 600 GB.
Paul, I do not personally use the setting to limit the size of backups to a specific value though I suspect that retaining the first version of the backup may be in play here.
My own preference is to use the option to 'Store no more than X recent version chains' which I find easier to understand and use, but even with this, you need to understand that the backup drive has to have sufficient free space to hold X+1 version chains, i.e. X completed chains plus 1 further full backup image before the oldest chain is deleted.
I preferred not to use the number of chains method as it's a little harder to predict storage usage. If I had plenty of disk space I would happily go that way. I don't know what's gone wrong here, I guess I'll have to restart the chains from scratch to reset things. I have two machines I setup on a different network that backup to a NAS using Acronis and they both handle this setting perfectly. Thanks for your help Steve.
The automatic cleanup stops working when one move the archive to another drive (using proper option to do it). Sometimes it stop with no obvious reason. The support advises to recreate the backup task from the scratch.
After plenty of troubles I had found a hint elsewhere about removing/renaming database files at c:\ProgramData\Acronis\TrueImageHome\Database. I examined the files there. Beside binary database files there are files named 'Archives.db0000*.opt ' in XML format. They contain descriptions of the actual backup chains. It happens they can contain old, non-existing entries. They can contain old paths (despite moving). These improper chains or entries would never be cleaned. Sometimes they would cause errors signalled in logs.
When I removed the improper entries (with a text editor), the automatic cleanup regained its ability. Try it yourself.