Skip to main content

Change USB-disc: What happens?

Thread needs solution

Hello,

I'm doing a weekly incremental backup on a USB-disc. Thanks to trojans like "Locky", I bought a 2nd USB-disc, so that always one disc is not connected to the computer.

What happens if I switch the disc and TrueImage tries to write another backup? I tried it and now have something like this file-structure:

USB - full_b7_s1_v1
USB - full_b8_s1_v1
USB - full_b8_s2_v1
USB - full_b8_s3_v1
USB - full_b8_s4_v1
USB - full_b8_s11_v1
 

Will I be able to restore the full computer from that if I have only this harddisc? Or do I need always both discs?

 

0 Users found this helpful

Hello Martho, all of the backup images in your list are shown as Full images so there should be no problem restoring the computer from these assuming that the images can be validated and contain all the partitions needed for recovery, i.e. including any required hidden system / UEFI partitions.

If you are intending to swap the USB drives while keeping the same backup tasks, then you should ensure that you duplicate the folder names on the drives so that they look to be identical as far as possible.  You will have problems if you start writing incremental images to a drive and then switch to a different drive as the version chain will be incomplete and errors will occur if you tried to recover.

You may be better advised to set up two separate backup tasks, each one targetting one specific USB drive, then when you swap the USB drives over, switch to using the second backup task to match the second drive. This will help avoid problems later with recovery.

Thanks a lot for your fast reply! I'm a bit confused, because the backups I listed are sometimes only between 21 MB and 2 GB big, and it's a backup from a 512 GB disc, so could they be full images?!

Thanks for your hint to use 2 backup tasks. The problem is that I swap the disc irregular, so I have to enable/disable the tasks manually, but I see no other solution then. I thought perhaps that TrueImage is using the youngest image on the USB-disc to determinate which files to backup, but it seems it keeps this list on the computer I backup, connected to the task.

So thanks again.

 

 

Martho, the information about the images created for a backup task is held in the Database files which are found in C:\ProgramData\Acronis\TrueImageHome\Database - it is these files which will be looking at the USB drive to determine the next sequence to be created.  

If some of the listed 'Full' backup image files are only 21MB in size, I guess you may be seeing the result of automatic file splitting, especially if your USB drive is formatted for such as the FAT32 file system rather than as NTFS.  FAT32 cannot handle file sizes above 2GB whereas NTFS can handle files into the TB range with no need for splitting.

If you do have files which have been split in size, then all of the files for that sequence will be required to ensure a successful recovery.  I would recommend converting the USB drive to NTFS rather than using FAT32 - there are a number of utilities that can do this without needing to reformat the whole drive and lose existing backups on the drive.  If you have Acronis Disk Director this should be able to do this conversion, otherwise, you can use such as the free Easeus Partition Manager to do the same.

Martho,

You might consider the use of a third pary sync tool to simply sync both disk.  This way you would have a duplicate backup of one disk to another and only need the one disk connected for your backup tasks.

Thanks again for your replys. 

@Enchantech: Could you suggest such a software?

@Steve: Is it possible to "empty" this database for a task, making TrueImage start with a new full backup and then doing incremental backups based on this? The only solution I found doing this is deleting and re-creating the task which always seems to be "the very hard way" ;-)

I'm sorry for the confusion with the files: I just made mistakes while copying the filenames... Sorry for that. It's like:
USB - full_b7_s1_v1
USB - full_b8_s1_v1
USB - inc_b8_s2_v1
USB - inc_b8_s3_v1
USB - inc_b8_s4_v1
USB - full_b8_s11_v1

So it seems that TrueImage did it right, because it added a full backup after changing the disc.

 

 

 

 

Martho,

There are many choices in Sync applications.  What would work best for you I cannot say but a good place to start your search for such a product is at the link below.  Read the commentary and then check out the reviews linked at the bottom.  Google Sync Software yourself and do some research.  I am confident that you can find something that is right for you.

http://sync-software-review.toptenreviews.com/

I personally just use Windows Robocopy - it works fine for me for this purpose.  I've tested the free version of AllwaySync as well and that seems like it would probably meet your needs as well.  As Enchantech mentioned though, you'll want to research and/or try some to find the one that best meets your needs.  Do you have Acronis Cloud?  If so, it has Sync capability as well (I have not tried it though), but it syncs to the cloud first which would make the process slower so if you just need local copies, try one of the other ones.

Here is a quick input I wrote about robocopy before - it's pretty easy to use once you've tried it a couple of times.  Main thing is to be sure your Source and Destination are not reversed because as soon as you press enter, it will do exactly what it's supposed to.

http://forum.acronis.com/forum/112733#comment-330661