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New User Looking for Some Best Practise Guidance

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Hi All,

 

Looking for some guidance please.

I am mainly interested in backing up data folders that i can choose manually, Not used this since i bought it a while ago and thought it was time to get stuff sorted before i end up losing data

I have a 5TB NAS primarily purchased for the intention of storing all my backups. 

So looking at the best way to backup regularly, say 1 Full backup on a Monday, with a differential backup each day Tues-Sun, then repeat 1 Full on the Monday. I would like these backups to be stored on a volume on the NAS, with an auto delete process that deletes backups older than a month or something similar.

Is this possible? or what you recommend a different approach?

 

Any guidance would be appreciated 

 

 

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John, your ATIH 2017 software can certainly do what you are looking for, but please be aware that it is capable of doing much more than just backing up your selected data folders.

Your most precious feature of your computer system and the part that takes the longest to recover, is the Windows OS and all your installed programs, and I would recommend including a regular full disk & partitions backup of this data, so that if the worse case happens and you lose a disk drive due to failure etc, you will be in a position to recover back to a working system in a matter of a couple of hours (on average) versus taking days or longer if you have to start completely from bare metal and reinstall everything again.

Take a look at the Best Practices Forum where many of your questions will have been discussed by other users over time.

See also post: 117004: Great Acronis "How-To" videos and other Acronis Resources for a number of good tutorial type resources.

Dealing with specifics, when you create a backup task, you first select the source (what to backup) then select the destination (where to backup) and then click on Options to set the detail of when, how etc.

It is in the Options settings that you can choose the schedule you want to use, i.e. backup daily at 9pm, then choose the Backup scheme which can be from a choice of doing only Full backups, Incremental (only the changes since the prior backup), Differential (all changes since the prior full backup).

In the advanced setting for the Backup Scheme you can turn on Automatic cleanup which is where the management of the backups is handled, i.e. you can choose based on age or by the number of backups to retain but you need to understand that this works on completed backup version chains, not on individual backup files.

A completed backup version chain comprises of all the files sharing the same backup sequence number in the file name, i.e. _b1_ would be the first backup sequence number, and the chain is only considered to be complete when the next sequence is started with a new full backup, i.e. _full_b2_ in the name.

You control how many files will be in the version chain by the setting in the Backup Scheme, i.e. Create a new full backup after 6 incremental or differential backups.

There are other settings in the Options pages, i.e. Notifications for being sent an email when a backup is performed so you know the result; Exclusions where you can say what should not be included in the backup (or remove any of the default exclusions set by Acronis), and finally an Advanced page where you can control other specific configuration settings such as Error Handling, Performance etc.  If you are doing an Acronis Cloud backup then the Advanced page is where you choose which datacentre to use for storing the cloud backup, which should be the nearest to you.

I guess, the best time to do an OS backup is after a clean configured build. These build has been going for months.

 

John, there is no better time than the present then to do regular backups as any significant changes occur.