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Daily backups with weekly drive swaps

Thread needs solution

I am interested in always havng a fairly recent backup stored where it cannot be affected by an infection of my PC.
A Google search produced a solution which opened with the following statements -

"Consider the following scenario:

  • You want to perform daily backups of your machine: a full backup each Monday and incremental backups on Tuesday through Sunday.
  • You want to store the backups on a locally attached USB hard drive in the archive MyMachine.
  • You have two such drives. You want to swap them each Monday so that one drive contains backups of the current week (Monday through Sunday), and the other drive those of the previous week.".

This was followed by step-by-step details of how to achieve those objectives and I think must have come from a much older version of Acronis - perhaps version 11.5 ?

I am interested to know whether this can be done in my Acronis 2016, build 6581 running on my desktop PC with Windows 10 and, if so, can  I access detailed step-by-step insructions on how to proceed ?
I am 90 years of age and did not use a comnputer until age 75 so I need detailed written instructions.
I cannot follow video instructions and do not want a Cloud solution.
Can any kind soul help me please?
Bryan.
 

 

 

 

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Hi Bryan,

The only way to protect your backup from infection, is to take them "offline" using the bootable rescue media and only attaching that drive to the system for this purpose (when windows is not running).  Of course though, this defeats the ease of automation, but you can use automated tasks to take regular backups on a schedule, and then take less frequent "manual" offline backups as added protection from malware and ransomware.

Regardless of any backup product in use, if you attach your backup drive to a running OS that has been compromised with malware or ransomeware, your backup is just as much at risk as everything else that the OS has access too. 

By using the offline recovery media, you are doing backups of the disk while it is idle and the OS is not running so malware designed to run within Windows cannot activate and access your backup data.  That's not to say that you might not be backing up malware that aleady could exist in the OS, but at least it won't have the opportunity to run using this method, assuming you never attach the drive to the computer while Windows is actively running.  If you do do that, then all bets are off because who knows when/where malware will attack, or what it will do when it does.

For peace of mind, you should look to use the 3-2-1 backup method... 3 copies of your data (1 original + AT LEAST 2 backups), 2 different backup locations (for instance an online backup to drive B and an offline backup to drive C) and at least 1 offsite backup (in case your house burns down which might take the original and all of your local backups with it).  Backup 1 from within Windows will meet your automation needs.  Backup 2 from your rescue media will meet your malware protection needs.  Then store one of those backups offsite (Cloud is a good place for remote)... or better yet, take a third backup and put it in the Cloud or store that one somewhere else .  The more you can diversify backup types, frequency and location, the more options you have for recovery if/when the time comes that you need to peform a real-world restore.