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safely deleting acronis backups (external drive) Acronis no longer sees

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Apologies if I'm asking a question that basically has already been answered :) ... but I looked at this very helpful post from Steve Smith (thanks Steve :)  ) 

https://forum.acronis.com/forum/acronis-true-image-2016-forum/cannot-de…

and there was something I wanted to clarify

I had to manually update Acronis True Image 2017 to the latest version since it wasn't automatically updating  (see

https://forum.acronis.com/forum/acronis-true-image-2017-forum/anyone-se… )

and I noticed when I was using Acronis to make backups today that Acronis is not seeing the backups made on the external hard drive after my manual update - to clarify a bit further Acronis sees the backups made to the secondary internal hard drive in the computer, it just doesn't see the old backups on the external hard drive.

Also to clarify a bit further I have no problem making new backups onto the external hard drive - for example I made a backup today, February 2022, onto the external hard drive, Acronis is just not "seeing" the backups I made on the external hard drive prior to that (that is, prior to me manually updating Acronis True Image 2017 to the latest version).

My concern is over how to delete the old backups on the external hard drive that Acronis no longer sees... I remember reading that Acronis officially recommends not using windows explorer to do this, whereupon Steve in the above link says you can safely do this - Steve has never steered me wrong like ever so of course I'm going to follow his advice :)

What I'm wondering is this - did Steve mean in his post above that after I use windows explorer to manually delete the backups Acronis no longer sees that I should go ahead and have Acronis do a validation of all the backups I did not delete (whether those backups are on the internal secondary hard drive on the computer or the external hard drive that connects to the outside of the computer) in order to "reconcile the internal Acronis database" as Steve put it?  

Thanks in advance to anybody who reads this and responds :) 

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Andre, as your are using ATI 2017 the options open to you are more limited than if you were using 2019 or later where Acronis has introduced the 'Clean up versions' tool to help with managing backups.

In this instance, I would suggest doing a validation for the backup task that created the 'missing' backups on your external drive and see if this finds them and adds them back or not?

If validation doesn't add them back, then they should be safe to delete via Explorer because there shouldn't be any stored information about those files in the internal database.

The alternative approach here would be to do the reverse actions, i.e. delete (or move the files) from the external drive, then do a validation and see if it throws any pop-up messages about missing files - it it does, then take the Ignore (if offered) or else the Cancel option for each message.

Thanks so much for the quick response Steve :) ...

By backup task do you mean a scheduled backup?   To be honest I don't do the scheduled backups which is bad I know :( .. I find it quickly eats up storage space in the secondary hard drive inside the PC so I just do a manual backup once per month (documents are saved on a second drive so if the C drive gets all goofy on me the documents are safe on a different drive - well relatively safe, I know some evil hacker can lock up everything on the PC thus the backup onto an external hard drive not normally connected to the PC too :) ) 

I did go ahead and delete the backups Acronis is unable to see manually using file explorer and then I ran a validation on the backups I did keep,  both the backups to the hard drive mounted internally into the computer and   on the backups created on the external hard drive - in both cases Acronis gave me a green check mark indicating the validation was successful... so hopefully everything is okay - I'll find out the next time I have to restore Windows from an Acronis backup! :) 

Andre, by backup tasks, I meant the tasks that created the 'missing' backup files and therefore would normally store information about those files in the internal database.

Good to read that validation is good after deleting the unlisted files!

Oh I see !   I guess I don't know as much about Acronis as I thought  :(    , I don't know where I'd find the tasks that created the "missing" backup files ... basically I tell Acronis to run a backup and then the backup stays there on the Acronis True Image window that pops up along with a list of all the other backups I created... but in this case the backups on the external hard drive created prior to my manually updating Acronis True Image were missing entirely... as far as I can tell the only task I do is a one-time thing for each backup created when I tell Acronis " Hey make a backup of this but don't keep updating the backup every time there's a change to the Windows/C drive " or to put it another way I say " no " to the scheduling option .... 

Andre, each file created by an Acronis backup task uses the task name for part of the file name that are created.

So if you create a task called 'My PC' then the files created would share the same name stem, i.e. 'My PC_Full_b1_s1_v1.tib'.   This should help you to look at your list of backup tasks to see if such a task is shown in the list?

If you have files with no corresponding task shown in the GUI, then they are effectively orphans and can be deleted safely via Explorer.

Oh I see - thanks so much Steve :) ... I think the " If you have files with no corresponding task shown in the GUI, then they are effectively orphans and can be deleted safely via Explorer." applies here since I was not seeing them at all in the list of backups on Acronis (by which I mean the backups to the external hard drive I mentioned earlier that were not showing after manually updating Acronis) .