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Deleting all but latest full and incremental backups in a single backup

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When I create incremental daily backups requiring a new backup every 5 days, can I then delete all the great previous strings or does this create a problem when attempting  to restore specific files and folders?

I tried that yesterday (I deleted all but the latest full and incremental backups), and when I tried to recover some specific files for one backup, I got the message “cannot find version 6. You may have moved or deleted it. Please click browse and specify its location. If you ignore it the previous version will be used for recovery.”

When I did browse and clicked on the latest full backup (which also had some incrementals associated with it), I got the same “cannot find version 6” error message. When reviewing the backups in the location folder, I really couldn't tell what the error message was referring to when it indicated version 6.

What am I doing wrong? When I have accumulated a large volume of full and incremental backups associated with a single backup, can I delete all but the latest full and incremental backups to save space?

Thank you

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James, if you have manually deleted any of your backups using Windows Explorer then you must do a Validation of your backup task that created those deleted backups in order to reconcile the information in the Acronis Database with the status of your backup files.  During the validation you will get messages about the missing backups that you need to reply with Ignore and repeat this as needed.

The recommended method of managing backups is to use the auto-cleanup rules, my preference is to use Store no more than x recent version chains where the caveat is to ensure you have sufficient space on your storage drive to hold x+1 version  chains as older backups will not be deleted until the next version chain has been started successfully with the first full backup.

When you delete manually some tib files, or rename them, or move them, you really need to know ATI quirks to avoid catastrophic situations at restore time.

When ATI asks you for version 6, it asks you for the 6th backup file (full or incremental).

If this happens when you start the backup, and ATI asks, you can choose to ignore. If the problem doesn't go away regardless of the file you point to, or ignore, your backup is compromised.

In theory, you can manually delete the latest incrementals, and then tell ATI to ignore the missing files. Then ATI will start from the remaining incrmental.

For most users, I strongly recommend you simply don't mess around with TIB files manually. It is safer to:

- move the files you want to keep to another folder on the same disk to avoid a long copy, and for safekeeping,

- delete the tasks, settings and file sfrom ATI;s UI

- start a new fresh new task in an empty directory