Automatic delete oldest copy does not work
I use a couple of identical external USB drives for backup. I swap these daily to take one off site. That means each drive has every 2nd backup on it. Acronis is set to keep at most 3 copies but doesnt delete the oldest so I run out of room on the disk. Is this a bug? What can I do to fix this?


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David Bilander wrote:I use a couple of identical external USB drives for backup. I swap these daily to take one off site. That means each drive has every 2nd backup on it. Acronis is set to keep at most 3 copies but doesnt delete the oldest so I run out of room on the disk. Is this a bug? What can I do to fix this?
David, the root cause of your problem is in your statement above - ATIH is not designed to work with multiple different external disk drives for a single backup task - each drive has a unique drive identifier (UUID) - when you create a backup task the UUID of the target drive is stored in the Acronis Database but when you swap to the second drive, the Database no longer can match the new UUID to the one it has stored.
This is not a bug in the Acronis software but the way it is intended to work.
The way around this is to create two separate backup tasks, one for each external drive and only run the task when the correct drive is connected.
Alternatively, see post https://forum.acronis.com/forum/124410#comment-384307 where another user was doing the same and found a workaround by using a Symbolic Link to map the external drives to a local folder on the main system drive.
Please note that this will not resolve the issue of automatic cleanup as your backup drives will not match the Acronis Database record of backup files because these are being stored on two different external drives and Acronis will still expect all files to be on a single drive.
You will need to manually manage the backup files and remove unwanted copies using Windows Explorer then run a Validation of your backup task but this may still give errors because it will only find half of your backup files.
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