Backup storage issues

Rob, welcome to this user forum and congratulations on persevering with the ATIH 2016 product even though you have some dislikes about it - I am sure that you are not alone in this and would recommend that you use the Feedback tool (found under Help) in the software to make your dislikes known to the Acronis developers.

As far as managing your backups goes, you can still manually delete your unwanted Differential backup images using such as Windows Explorer, but as you have found, the downside to doing this is that your Acronis database files will become out of sync with your stored backups, and you will get warning notices about missing versions.

The workaround for these notifications is to perform a Validation of the backup tasks, then take the option to Ignore the missing versions(s) when offered - this will put the database back into sync again.  See screen shot for where this option is.

The recommended method of managing your backup images is to use the automatic cleanup options on the Backup Scheme page tab of your task options, where you have a range of different choices for managing how many full / differential or incremental images should be stored, how many versions chains (complete sets of a full plus x number of differential or incremental images), or how much free space should be available before older backups are removed automatically.

Please take time to take a look at the Best Practices forum which has a wealth of guides and information to help in these areas.

Hi 

Thanks for your quick response, I have tried the auto clean-up and set it to 2, checked few weeks later and had 5 diff + 1 full, I never found this to work great on previous versions either tbh. 

I will try the feedback tool. Can’t be much to ask to just sort out old backups, I’ll try changing a few more settings and look at the best practices forum too, see if can’t find something to help in there.

Rob

Rob, I have not had any problems with using automatic cleanup on my systems but there can be a lot of misunderstanding about how the cleanup works, especially with regards to version chains.

Without actually seeing your precise settings it is difficult to comment as to whether what you are seeing is correct or not, but to give a quick example of how this works may help in setting the scene here.

If I create a backup scheme to perform a Custom backup which creates 1 full backup image followed by 5 differential backup images, then creates a new full backup with a further 5 differential backup images.

This new backup scheme has in effect created 2 complete backup version chains when it creates the third new full backup image.

If I had set to keep no more than 2 version chains in the backup scheme settings, then the oldest (first backup version chain) would not be removed until the third new full backup had been created, thus starting that third new version chain.

If you specify to only keep your version chains for x days, then you need to understand that the x days are not counted until the version chain is complete, i.e. in the example above, a complete version chain = 1 full plus 5 differential images, and the x days start counting when the next version chain is started building.

Grovers Accumulated Wisdom articles has lots of examples of configuring different backup schemes complete with illustrations that would help you.

SirDogbert,

After you create your backup and cleanup schemes, have you been going back in and modifying the backup task in anyway?  Any changes to a scheme after backups have started will reset the version count in that scheme.  Even if you don't make an change, but click OK/Save instead of cancel, will mark thatthe backup scheme has changed.  

For instance, let's say you have configured a task for a week of backups such as 1 full + 6 differentials = 1 version chain.  Your clean up schedule is to keep no more than 2 version chains.  However, after 5 diffs of the first backup chain, you decide to change the exclusions in the task and save them.  You now need to wait for 6 more diffs before the next full will run as the the version chain will start over again.  This in turn prevents cleanup and new backups from occurring until the chains have completed.

Depending on your cleanup rule, cleanup may take awhile as well.  Many people set their cleanup rule for X number of days.  That X number of days does not apply until all version chains are complete, not X days from the start of the backup.  Again though, if the backup task was modiifed along the way, that X number of days gets pushed farther out as well.