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Questions About Revising the Backup Scheme

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Currently, am doing full weekly backups of my 500GB SSD (these are <50GB in size) to an 1TB internal HDD (using W10 and ATI 16).  I store 1+5 copies and do not ever delete copy 1.  I wish to make a change to my current back up scheme.  Everything will stay the same except the destination drive.  That, I intend to change from the internal 1TB HDD to an external 4TB HDD.  From past experience, I have learned the hard way that I can't simply randomly delete old versions of the backup files and only keep what I want, as they are all somehow linked.  Doing so compromised my ability to do a restore.  So my question is this:

1/ how can I effect the change I want without compromising my backup capability?  I imagine that I must copy "Copy 1" to the new desired destination location (the external drive) but what of the other 5 backup copies?  Need they be copied also? 

2/ Furthermore, what happens if later, I decide to revise my back-up scheme radically, such as going to an incremental backup or something.  Need I keep all the old copies (full backups in this example) until such time as the new scheme has been in place for a cycle or two to allow a restore?  And under this new hypothetical scheme, are any or all of the original version copies (full backups), restorable and when I do delete one or more of them, will the original Copy 1 remain restorable?

 

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Marty, given the type of change you are wanting to make, which is to move the destination for your backup task from an internal drive to an external one, I would recommend taking a different approach.

Connect your external 4TB HDD and then go into Windows Disk Management and change the drive letter for this to be from later in the alphabet, i.e a letter that is unlikely to be given to another USB device being plugged in, such as drive S:  

Open ATIH 2016 and select your backup task, now take the option from the menu for this task to 'Clone settings' and this will create a duplicate of the task with the same name, but prefixed by (1).

Edit this new cloned task and select your new destination drive on the 4TB disk.  You can also rename the backup task if you wish to do so, but avoid giving it the exact same name as the original task to keep the name unique.

At this point, if you want to repurpose the 1TB internal HDD, then simply create a folder on the 4TB drive and copy any of your original backup .TIB files to that folder, i.e. the initial first copy of the backup made for the old task.  Do not put this is the same destination folder as the new task.

Next, if the old backup task is no longer needed, then just take the Delete option from the task menu, but only remove the task settings, leave the backup files as they are until such time that your cloned backup task has been up and running for a little time.

Finally, run the new backup task or set it to run on schedule and check that all is working as expected.