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Automatic delete oldest copy does not work

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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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What is your backup scheme - are there any inc or diff scheduled in addition to the full?  Each version chain is completed with the successful completion of the next full.  So, if you have 3 complete version chains and tell it to keep 3, the 4th full must complete before any cleanup will happen.

Also, AND THIS IS THE IMPORTANT ONE... if you make changes to your backup task after backups have run, it immediately resets the version chain count.  

Example:  You're scheme daily.  You pick custom scheme/full only.  You have it set to keep only 3 version chains.  In this case, after the 4th full backup, it should remove the 1st one.  However, if you mess with the script and save after #1, #2 or #3, you are back to needing 3 more full backups.  I you keep messing with it, it may never cleanup.  Rule of thumb from the MVP's... get your backup scheme set correctly and once you start backing up, leave it alone if you want the cleanup rules to take place as you have them set.

If you want to posts screenshots of your backup scheme for reference, please feel free to do so, but I'm pretty sure it's the modifying of your task after the backup was saved and ran that is preventing the cleanup from running as configured. 

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.