Swapping drives and storing off site
Hi!
I want to be able to swap drives for my backup. Since ATI lacks real support for this, I'm considering a work around by creating a backup job, letting it run e.g. weekly for a number of months on one drive (drive A), and then swapping the drive with another one (drive B), deleting the first backup job for drive A from ATI2017 and creating a new backup job for drive B. Drive A would be transported to another location. What will happen though, if I the need arises to read back the backup from drive A? I've deleted the backup job for drive A from ATI2017. Will ATI2017 still be able to read some of the files or all the files back from the backup on drive A?
The standard work around seems to be to create n different backup jobs in ATI2017 aimed at different drives, and configuring each backup job run e.g. every nth week. This means that one has to remember to connect the right drive each week before that week's backup job runs. This doesn't suit my needs. I want to store at least one of the backup drives in a separate location, but I don't want to carry drives back and forth every week.
Hello Magnus,
I've added your feedback to the existing feature request (internal ID for ref TI-32805 Backup to removable drives with regular swap), but the chances this feature will be supported are very slight.
For now, just do as Steve suggests and use a separate backup job for each drive. It will only complete when the drive associated with that backup is available. And doing this will keep the tasks clean and separate.
For what's it worth, the behavior is the same in many other home backup products too. It actually works the same way in the 5 home backup I have installed and use for testing and comparison...
Acronis, Macrium, EaseUS, Aomei, Veeam and of course Windows backup. They all have unique features and qwerks, but none of these let's you rotate the destination out on a single backup job without manually modifying and updating the destination.
Plus, if you use a backup scheme (differential or incremental) having files split across different disks that may not be available at the same time will likely mean you won't be able to recover.
Thanks everyone for your input.
Steve, your suggestions on how to achieve a more frequent update of the off-site copy are good, but that would reuire me to put a computer / NAS / whatever in the off-site location. There's nothing like that now there, and I can't be bothered with buying and maintaining such equipment. I'm trying to avoid using cloud services, since the amount of data is so large that it will incur a monthly / yearly fee.
Thanks for the feedback Ekaterina. I can see that it makes sense on your part to steer users towards your cloud service instead, since it's already available.
Bobbo_3C0X1, it's good to know that the competition doesn't support rotating disks / destinations either. It saves me the time of researching it myself.
I suppose I could look into software geared at the SOHO market, that perhaps would support rotating disks, but I assume that would also land me with backup software that is both more complex to use and more expensive. I don't want that.
It seems to me that my current work around is good enough for me. I realize that I run the risk of losing a few months of data this way in the event of fire, break in etc., but the risk of such an event is low enough that it is acceptable to me.