Mobile Backup of Android Phone Accumulates Thousands of Duplicate Files
Every time a phone is backed up, another complete copy of the Photos and Videos (along with other files) is created.
These files grow and grow in size but Acronis does SOMETHING that makes it impossible to delete them without formatting the partition holding them.
How can I delete obsolete backup copies?
Please take care when deleting this data - some of this is simply mirrored from the actual target location for your mobile data and not physically present on the reflected drive.
This was dealt with in another user topic in the forums recently where it looked as if several GB's of data was being put on the C: drive but in reality that data was in the designated Mobile Backup location only.
I have written a program that walks through all of the 'photos' and 'videos' sub-folders and copies anything new to just one set of 'photos' and 'videos' folders. (All of that gets backed up in the Cloud in another way.)
I have no need to keep dozens of snap-shots of our two Android phones.
I have set the Acronis target location to Y: where there are now several .tibx files. The total size of those seems much too small to be holding all of the photos.
The 'mysterious' M: drive that Acrois has created is where the actual photos and videos are stored. I'm not really sure where that is physically located. When browse to my profile AppData\Local\Acronis\Acronis Drive sometimes I see all the folders and sometimes it's all hidden and looks empty. Currently I have 58k files and 44 GB of occupied space. Most of the files are duplicate copies.
These are the ones I'd like to get rid of, or at least delete old ones. But NOTHING I try seems able to delete them.
Some of the files are from phones we no longer even have.
I suspect that some component of Acronis has to be running for the mystery M: drive to be mapped to those folders AND for those folders to be visible to the file explorer.
What, may I ask, is "Active Protection" and where to I find it?
Also, I have a number of 'orphaned' Acronis files that I cannot seem to get rid of other than by formatting the partition.
OK, I found 'Active Protection' but when I turn it off, everything that appears in AppData\Local\Acronis\Acronis Drive
disappears.
There are seven folders and on the 'target Y drive' there are seven .tibx files but I cannot tell which is which.
My only option seems to be to format that Y: drive which Acronis probably won't like at all!
Joschk, please see KB 59584: Acronis True Image 2017: how to change Acronis Drive letter which will give you a better understanding of how Acronis Drive maps to a drive letter (default M:) for your Mobile Backup .tibx files.
See also forum topic: How to delete Acronis Drive from C drive. which is the post I was referring to with my earlier update / warning about deleting files.
Thank for your effort but you are totally misunderstanding the problem I am trying to solve.
For each different Mobile device that I have Acronis backup, there is a folder in the M: (default letter) pseudo drive with a name like: Galaxy C9 Pro (this folder is the sole occupant of a .tibx file but the two do not share the same name.)
Each and every time Acronis takes a backup of one of our two Android phones, there is a folder created with a name like: 11-9-2017 10_04_59 AM
And inside the date-time folder are five more folders, two of which (photos and videos) are of interest to me.
Whatever photos and videos are on the phone, those are backed up again and again so there can be dozens of copies of each photo and each video.
Because I want to preserve our photos and videos, I have written a relatively simple program that walks through the above structures and extracts no more than one copy of any photo or video.
All of the above is fine and dandy. The problem I'm addressing is two fold:
1. The top level folders (contained in a .tibx file with a non-matching name) become obsolete once a particular Android device is discarded. But there is no reliable way for me to identify which .tibx I should/could delete. (Though, at least, I now know how to delete one if only I could identify it with certainty.)
2. For the Android devices in active use, I would also like to purge many, if not most, of the date-time named folders as their contents have already been preserved in our photo/video archive and they are only wasting space and a little processing time when I step through and extract the unique names. Note too that I cannot effectively delete any photo or video because my program will dutifully extract it from the above structures.
I assume you realize that the M: drive is a pseudo structure mapped onto the .tibx files. I have discovered that if I turn off 'active protection' the M: drive disappears. So, while you might think turning off 'active protection' would allow me to delete some of the obsolete folders, this approach does not work.
As far as I can see, there is no setting in Acronis to automatically delete backups greater than some chosen age. If there is such a setting, where is it? If there isn't such a setting there really SHOULD be. I've been doing computer system support for over 50 years and I assure you that 'automatic purging of obsolete backups' has been a standard requirement for backup software since I can no longer remember.
Thanks again for you patient attention to my problem.
I can only suggest that you open a support case for this issue. There may be some correlation between what you describe and any cloud service such as Verizon cloud on your Andriod device that are part of this issue. This is above my expertise and I am certain that Support would want to look into this!
Agree with Joschka. I just started my Mobile backups from ONE tablet one week ago and already have 14 GBs of data, much of it duplicates.
This is not a space problem at the moment for me because I moved the backup from my tiny SSD drive to a larger drive, but I hope that Acronis would add a feature to delete old backups or something in an update.
Would it be possible to include backups of the Documents folder in the future. I know they are probably limited by what Google will allow. :)
I REALLY appreciate this feature to be able to backup to my own drive rather than to the Cloud.