Newbie dumb question re Backing Up

Jez, welcome to these public User Forums.

My question is, does the backup operation fail if you turn the computer off before the backup is made and completed ?

Does ATI backup not have enough intelligence built-in it to CONTINUE backing up (from an unfinished backup) once the computer restarts ?

The backup will fail is you turn off the computer before it has completed!
ATI cannot continue a failed backup without starting over again from the beginning except for when backing up to the Acronis Cloud.

This seems the only reason why I'm getting failures.  I cannot otherwise see why the conditions I've set in the "Backup Scheme" area of the software are not being adhered to (i.e. to create full versions after every 6 and to delete version chains older than 7 days, and to 'delete the first version of the backup').

 Automatic cleanup works only on completed backup version chains, where the age of the chain does not start counting until after the next chain has been started by the successful creation of a new Full backup image file, so your 7 days starts at that point - not 7 days from when files were created!

Thanks Steve, that's great.  Since that post I did in fact learn more about the software, especially that you can set it so that it will shut down the computer once the backup has finished and mine were not set up like that.

Now that I understand a lot better how this software works, I'm sure it'll do exactly what I need it to !

One other question if I may please.

I've re-configured my backups, so that they are performed during the day (morning in fact).  Previously, when I was getting errors, I had them set up to run in the evening, but then I was switching the computer off midway (mistakenly thinking that Acronis would pick up where it left off).

I've set them to run during the morning, during working hours, but am concerned that that'll affect my computer's performance, so I'm reconsidering re-scheduling them to operate during the evening again BUT marking them to "shutdown the pc once backup is completed".

Mornings is safer (because I can ignore having set the software to shut the PC down once backups have been completed), but Evenings is more convenient.

So.... my question !

If I opt to revert to making backups in the evening, and set Acronis to switch off the computer once backups are finished, will it do so, EVEN IF I am actually still working on my computer (i.e. using it and working on it) ?

My concern is how would Acronis know I am still working on it ?  Maybe I might be watching Netflix, would Acronis still switch off the computer in that scenario ?

Many thanks for your help and advice.

If I opt to revert to making backups in the evening, and set Acronis to switch off the computer once backups are finished, will it do so, EVEN IF I am actually still working on my computer (i.e. using it and working on it) ?

Jez, yes, if you set ATI to shutdown when the backup is complete, then it will try to do just that regardless of what you may still be doing.

Acronis will normally run in the background with low impact on performance but this can still have some impact on your other activities as will be reading from and writing to disk.

A lot here can depend on the size of data involved and the time that the backup takes to complete. I don't use the option to shutdown when complete myself, as prefer to keep full control of when I shutdown or restart.

I would suggest giving it a try with the task running during the morning on a day where any impact will not affect anything important that you are doing, then see how you find the impact on your other tasks being performed.

Thanks again Steve,

I was thinking the same, I'd prefer to run it during the mornings and monitor how much of an impact (if any) it has during me working.

There are times when I do work late at nights and the last thing I'd want is for Acronis to decide to shutdown my machine midway during a project !

Thanks for all your advice and guidances.