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Proper Procedure of Getting Rid of Old Backups

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I'm running Acronis 2017 on a Windows 7 Desktop. I have Acronis configured to run an incremental backup every day and to create a full version after every 6 incremental versions. At this point the full backup is 1.6 TB so in order to avoid having to have absurd quantities of hard drive space on hand I need to get rid of old backups. What's the proper way to do this? Right now I can't run a full backup until I get rid of the previous full backup but this is clearly not the right way to do things because even though the backups still seem to be running, if I try to restore a file I get a message about "cannot find version 1" and so on. I can see the last full backup on my backup drive but for some reason Acronis apparently can't restore from it. Thanks!

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Bruce, welcome to these User Forums.

What is the size of your backup version chain here, i.e. the size of a full backup plus 6 incremental backups?

The recommended method of managing old backup version chains is to use the Automatic Cleanup option on the Backup Scheme page for your backup task.

My own preference is to use "Store no more than X recent version chains" where I set X = 2 in most cases.  What this means in reality is that my backup drive needs to have sufficient free space to actually hold 3 version chains.  This is because nothing is deleted until the next version chain has been started by a successful full backup file being created.

If you don't have sufficient free space on your backup drive to hold at least 2 x Full backups plus 6 incremental files, then you either need to get a bigger backup drive, or you need to consider how to split your backup into smaller chunks of data. 

Example: if you are using "Entire PC" for the backup source data and have multiple disk drives or partitions included in this selection, then change to doing a Disks & Partitions backup, and just choosing a specific disk drive & its partitions.

If you have no choice but to manually delete old backups then you should always do a Validation for the backup task that created them.  This is required to try to reconcile the information for that task and its files which is stored in the Acronis Database files.  Each missing file will cause an error popup for "Cannot find version X" where you should take the Ignore option to remove the link to that missing file from the database store.

Thanks Steve. I saw that setting to do with version chains but misunderstood what it meant and how to use it.

So, here's what I'm up against. One backup version chain is about 1.7 TB. Since my backup drive is 3TB this means I can't fit more than one version chain on the drive, and that's already with the backup set to only backup the files that actually need to be backed up. I have 5 hard drives and I've gone through and selected the files I want to have backed up. (I'm a photographer and work with very large image files so that's why I've got so much data.) So, it seems like the best solution would be to get a 4TB or even a 5TB drive.

In the meantime, I'll try the technique of validating the backup.

Thank you very much for your assistance.

Bruce,

There is a good deal on external 6TB Seagate drives HERE