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Evaluating Using Acronis to Archive Old/Large Files,

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Good Afternoon -

Hopefully someone with a better understanding of how Acronis works can help lead me out of this woods on this.

I recently took advantage of the free ungrade to Acronis True Image 2017, and am in early state of using it. To date I have used Acronis True Image 2016 to do on line backups of several machines. 

1. The Archive option seems as though it would be a better fit for what I'm trying to do.  No matter the size of the hard drive involved I seem to accumulate so much digital data that they're overcrowed to the point of affecting performance in no time.  I'd like to be able to upload my "quiet" files - older or really large folders of files - to free up space on my client machines.

That said, what is the difference between the recently announced Acronis Archiving and just using Acronis to back up my hard drives? I assume I'll have to rent file storage space on their server, which is not a problem. But what is the advantage of Archiving vs. Backing up.  I assume all my files are backed up on their server now (that is, not affected if I delete or edit a file by syncing on line).  But maybe I'm confused on how thier software works and what it's limits are.

2. Over several years I have also accumulated too many on line backups of my computers, and have long ago forgotten why I started new backups of my machines.  Anyone know if it's possible to consolidate the dozen or so on line backups I currently have into a sinlge backup or archive and get rid of the rest of them?

I'm beginning to get confused about how best to use my Acronis apps and what the difference is between their products. There's probably a clear explanation of how to use their various products on their server somewhere, but so far I haven't been able to locate it.

Thanks.

R

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Archivinig removes the original content from the source and puts those files in the Acronis cloud archive (or wherever you choose to archive to) - you still only end up with one instance of the data, but it's no longer stored locally so it frees up local storage space.  

Backups, keep the original content where it is originally located on your local storage, but then also creates a second copy of the data exactly as it was at the time of backup (redundancy) and you can store those backups wherever you want - another external disk, a NAS, the Cloud, etc.

Archiving is great.  However, personally, if it we're me, I would do a backup and then an archive - to be on the safe side.  Ultimately, you never want just one version of your important files and/or you don't want them in just one place.  At a minimum, a good backup and/or archive scheme would follow the rule of 3-2-1... at least 3 copies of the data (1 original + 2 backups)...  store the data in at least 2 different locations... 1 of those locations should be offsite.  That way, if you have some type of catastrophic failure (theft, fire, flood, total hardware loss or failure), you always have at least one other place to recover from too and if it is offsite and your house burns down, then you still can retrieve it from the second location.  

Acronis Cloud archives and/or backups is great for this offsite location, but it's also much slower for backup/restore and archive/retrieval.  Having local backups and/or archives makes all of this go much more quickly for when you need to recover the data.  But, if something goes wrong, or your local hardware goes belly up, then you have the offsite cloud backup archive to revert to.

It costs more to have local storage and cloud storage, but you can get an 8TB "archive" drive for a relatively low cost per GB.  and if you don't need that much space for local archives and/or backups, of course you can get smaller drives too.