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HELP SETTING UP WEEKLY INCREMENTAL BACKUPS EACH SUNDAY NIGHT FOR A MONTH

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Somewhere I have a bug in my thinking. I want to keep a full backup after the last of say 4 incremental backups. Does ATI delete the first full backup? So I setup a full backup and validate after each? Next Sunday I then get an incremental and so on for a month 3 more times Delete after (x) number of version chains? How many do I keep? Sooner or later I have a bunch of full backups yes? How do I delete these and keep the first and latest. I am easily confused and want to know how to setup the incremental backup scheme, how many version chains should I keep ect. I have been doing full backup because I am not clear on this.
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Tsquare, the ATI automatic cleanup rules work on the principle of backup version chains, so when you choose an option such as 'Store no more than X recent version chains' this means that you need to have sufficient space on your backup drive to hold X version chains plus to hold a further Full backup file, at which time the oldest version chain will be deleted.

A version chain = a Full backup plus all associated Incremental (or Differential) backups.  These will all have the same backup sequence identifier in the file name, i.e. all files with _b1_ or _b2_ etc.

There is a separate option on the task Backup Scheme page which allows you to keep the initial full backup ( [] Do not delete the first version of the backup ).

The decision on how many version chains to keep is one that you have to make determined by the sizes of the version chains involved and the capacity of the backup drive.

With regards to scheduling your backup to run weekly on a Sunday, you may have to compromise here as you need to allow for different numbers of days in each month, i.e. some with 31, some with 30 and February with either 28 or 29.  You can use the Schedule > Weekly option to run your backup each Sunday, but will need to decide whether to create a new Full backup after 3, 4 or 5 Incremental backups, depending on how many Sundays are in a month and when you want the Full backup to be created.

Steve,

Something tells me daily might be easier  for house keeping. Keeping and deleting version chains and when to make new complete backup is what has me tripped up. I have a 6Terabyte drive and approximately 1.5 terabytes of data.

Tom

Tom, if your data is approximately 1.5TB in size, then depending on the mix of file types, this could result in a .TIB file of a very similar size (if you are backing up such as images, videos, music which is already highly compressed) or just over 1TB is you have more text / document type files in the mix.

If I assume a full backup size of say 1.2TB along with a set of incremental .tib files adding up to a max of 1.5TB for the total backup version chain, then you would only be able to 'Store no more than 3 recent version chains' to give 4.5TB of chain files to leave enough space to create a further full backup of 1.2TB before your oldest version chain is deleted.

Steve,

Let's examine this naming structure.

Last night the New Full was created and I got a blue screen. All of the versions are still there. See attached.

I restored C:\ to 1/16/2018

I am doing something the application just does not like.

I would like to just validate that last full backup and start fresh but do not want to muck things up.

Help

Tom

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Tom, making an ATI backup should not cause a Blue Screen / BSOD but there is every possibility of this type of crash being caused by some of the latest Microsoft patches to fix the Intel & AMD CPU vulnerabilities that have been the focus of computer press recently.

Your backup file naming looks correct for ATI 2018.

Your automatic cleanup option to "Delete version chains older than 6 days" may not work as you imagine it to do.

For this option, the 6 days do not start counting until the next Full backup has been created, so from your file listing, the 6 days start from 1/28/2018 and nothing is deleted until 3/2/2018.

For validation, you can do this from Windows Explorer using the shell integration options given.

2018-01-28 22_05_57 Windows Validation.png