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How to eliminate some portion of incremental backups without corruption

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I normally customize my incremental backup to occur every day, with a new full backup begining every third day. Over time, the amount of space the backups occupy becomes very large. I would like to be able to eliminate all but the past two full and incremental backups in the series when the combined files become too large. My practice has been to remove the backup from the main list and search and add existing backup through the browsing process. When I try to do this, and browse for the backup files I may wish to restore, I see a list that has backups that I have erased as well as those that I wish to retain. Is there a formal process for doing this?

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James, there are several approaches to doing this type of backup cleanup activity.

You can obviously manually remove obsolete whole version chains, i.e. a full backup plus all associated incremental backup images, though if you do so, then the ATIH 2016 GUI may still 'remember' the deleted backups because records of these are still held in the internal database it uses.

The second method is to set the automatic cleanup options for your backup task to only keep a defined number of version chains which will result in ATIH removing all obsolete version chains when the cleanup criteria are satisfied.  You can also define a minimum amount of remaining free space on the target drive holding the backup version chains.

If you do perform manual cleanup of version chains, then I recommend running a Validation for the backup task(s) that created the removed backup images - this will then enable the database records for the deleted images to be cleaned up too and keep everything synchronised on your system.

Thank you Steve for the very helpful and clearly expressed info.  I notice on this page above is a link entitled "PM."  Not sure what those letters designate. When I click on that it appears that I may be sending you an email. Will you accept other questions via that direct email route?

James, although you can send Private Messages (PM) you will get a more comprehensive and possibly faster response by posting other questions directly in the forums.  I am just another user / volunteer here like the majority of those who answer the questions posed here, so cannot guarantee that I am always available (my wife has other ideas about how I spend my spare time for one!).