how to set up to backup every other week?
Hello,
My backup scheme is to make an image of each fixed disk to an external USB drive (call it drive a), then store that drive offsite and retrieve a different external USB drive (call it drive b). I do a full image, no excluded files, Single version scheme. The folder names and file names are identical on both external drives. Both usb drives map to drive letter 'H'.
Question is: how to I fully automate this setup? There isn't an 'every other week' schedule option.
On one Win10 machine, I have to go into each folder and delete the backup from 2 weeks ago. On another Win10 machine I have to 'browse' to the same file location that is in the settings. It doesn't recognize the different drive.
ATI 2015 handled this setup fine and all I had to do was swap out the external HDs. ATI 2016 isn't so smooth. A doubt ATI 2017 would work any better, but I'm hoping it would.
Ideas?
Thanks,
Mark


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I was originally thinking the symbolic link was pretty slick, but now that I think about it, I'm beginning to feel that this method is flawed.
As long as backups are run in a way that the full is always on the correct drive with the associated incrementals or differentials, it would be just fine.
However, if any scheduled backups are misssed (or additional manual backups run), that is going to throw the timinig off and then you'd end up with the full on one disk and subsequent incrementals or differentials on the other..... If the files are not all in the same location, the recovery will fail. Not the worst thing in the world as one could copy files from one drive to the other, but this complicates the process further... and if one of those drives is unaccessible or fails, then it's possible you lose a backup that is spread across the 2 different drives.
Seems to me, that having 2 diferent backup jobs - 1 for each drive is going to work better in the long run and will have the same effect as what you're trying to do. It just requires that you have 2 backup tasks instead of one and that each task has a unique name and I would not use the same drive letter unless you can guarantee both drives will never be connected at the same time and that you will always have the correct drive plugged in when it is it's time to backup.
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