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Earliest segments of backup chain are incremental - shouldnt they be a full backup?

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Hi

I have a monthly scheduled backup of my Windows partition (Drive C) and set the method to create a full backup after 2 increments and store no more than 2 recent chains.

After the backup completed this morning, I checked the backup drive and was surprised to see that the earliest backup (31 Dec 2017) starts with incremental segments. I was expecting to see a full backup first. Is that correct or am I missing something?

The earliest backup (incremental files) are followed by another incremental backup on 24 Feb 2018 and then todays full backup (31 March 2018).  So I only have 1 chain.  

Given that the earliest backup is incremental would this succeed in restoring my C drive should it be necessary?

Would be grateful if somone could clarify this for me.

Thanks

BR

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BR, any backup version chain is only complete if you have a Full plus all associated Incremental files for the same _b?_ sequence identifier.

If you don't have the initial Full backup for a chain, then the Incrementals are no good for any form of recovery or restore.

Thanks Steve.

That is what I suspected.

Seems logical the backup segments would start with a full backup followed by increments.

I think I deselected the "Do not delete the first backup" to recover some disc space and this seems to have left me with orphaned increments.

The earliest backups which are the orphaned increments are b1 followed by the only full backup, which is this mornings is b2.

Could I delete these early redudant increments or would that corrupt the backup chain?

Thanks for your time.

BR

If ATI is working correctly cleanup should not result in orphaned incremental backups.

Ian

... also, in compliance with the K.I.S.S. (keep it simple stupid) - principle:

if your are doing a MONTHLY backup with no more than 2 increments, why bother with increments at all ? Just do a full backup once every month - period.

BR, there should be no problem in deleting the orphaned incremental files but I would advise you to do a Validation for the backup task that created them after doing so as this will correct any information held in the Acronis Database files for the backup task.

I have not come across any reports of this type of behavior previously in these forums and never seen it for myself either.

In reply to by truwrikodrorow…

He Heiner

Thanks for the suggestion.

The full backup is 259GB so I use the increments to manage the space. I stagger various backup tasks so that there is always enough free space for each new backup.

But on your suggestion I'll review it and see if I can get away with only doing full backups.

Thanks for your time.

BR
PS I like that K I S S although I prefer the Keep It Simply SImple version! :)

In reply to by truwrikodrorow…

Thanks again Steve,

Good idea to run the validation. I moved what I thought were orphaned increments (as there was no full backup before them) to another folder. Straight away it was looking for version 26 of the backup. I moved the increments back to the original location, clicked retry and it then succesfully completed the validation.

What I found odd though was that none of the increments referred to version 26 in its filename...

  b1_s3_v1 through to v3

BR, interesting!  What happens if you try to look at the contents of your 'orphaned' incremental files by double-clicking on one of these in Explorer?  If they are true orphans then this shouldn't work!

Board Room said:

" I think I deselected the "Do not delete the first backup" to recover some disc space and this seems to have left me with orphaned increments. "

Yikes!  Is that what that option is for?  I thought it was to keep the very first backup chain, not the full backup in a chain of increments.  The actual wording of the option is "Do not delete the first version of the backup".

Steve Smith said...

What happens if you try to look at the contents of your 'orphaned' incremental files by double-clicking on one of these in Explorer? 
 

Hi Steve,

I can open some of them in File Explorer and navigate through the folders. But if I try and mount the same increment it complains it cant as the versions are stored in different locations.

The earliest increments wont open or mount. They prompt for version xx which no longer exists. 

So something went awry with the earliest backups of my C Drive.

Although the most recent backup of my C drive completed and validated succesfully, I'm wondering if I should make a new backup task for it and once completed and vaildated, delete the original task and associated .tib files. What do you think?  

Thanks again for your time.

BR

BR, a whole new backup task and set of backup image files would be my choice in this situation, especially if everything is going OK with your computer at present - no better time than now!

Keep the old complete backup until you are happy that the new task is successful, then initially just remove the old task settings (not the image files), which will allow you to remove any orphan files via Explorer.  Note: with ATI 2018 you will need to either turn off AAP or allow the action against the .tib files for an hour when AAP pops up a protection message box.  I find I have to tell it twice most times I do this type of clean up action.

Thanks again Steve.

The old task is now unscheduled but remains for the time being.

New task is cooking as I wirte. Thanks for your sound advise.

Regards

BR :)

Hello again Steve

I'm pleased to report that the new task completed successfully.

However, what I didnt expect is that it deleted the earlier full backup of the previous task (now unscheduled) and ALL the "orphaned" increments.

How/why would it do that???

The new task wasnt a "cloned settings" of the task it replaced.  It was a newly created task from scratch with a different name. The only similarty with the old task was that it backed up the same partitions at the same time to the same target.  Would TIH be fooled by that and make a connection to the previous tib files?

Very strange.

Hope you may be able to shed some light on this.

Thanks

BR 

 

BR, I've noticed that the cleanup function does not have to run under the task that created the files.  The log for Task A my contain cleanup for files created by TASK B if it is time for that cleanup to happen.  (Could be a bug but I assume it is purposeful.)  Orphaned incr files are not of any use; maybe they are valid target for any cleanup that happens to run.

(That's my feeble guess.)

BR, I have never seen this happen with any of my own cleanup actions for my tasks but the only real way of seeing what has happened is to look at the backup task logs that were created for the time span where this took place.

If you do not already have it, please download the MVP Log Viewer tool from the Community Tools link in my signature and use this to look at the logs shown for ti_demon.

Hi Steve

I downloaded the tool. Thanks.

Well I'm impressed with the cleanup process. Much more thorough than I remember from earlier versions of TIH. 

It even managed to find some tib files I had temporarily moved to another drive to free up some space and forgot to put back! Not quite sure how it managed to find them automatically.

Pleased to say Ive now got tons of free space on my backup drive and no need to manually delete anything apart from the old task once the last backup with that name has been deleted.

Thanks again for your help.

BR