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Simple drive clone with incremental updates

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I'm a motion graphics artist who recently switch from Mac to PC and am having some trouble backing up my Media drives as I used to on Mac.

I used to use a program called Carbon Copy Cloner to incrementally clone my Media drive to my Media Backup drive every night. It was extremely easy to setup and understand because my Media drive and Media Backup drive looked exactly the same every morning with one exception. On the Media Backup drive there was an extra folder called _CCCSafetyNet which stored all files that were deleted from the Source drive. As the Source and Destination drives filled up CCC would prune the _CCCSafetyNet deleting the oldest files first until it had enough space to perform the clone.

If the Source drive ever died I could just use the Backup without every having to run any recovery operation because the drives were exactly the same - no disk images, no .tib files, just a straight copy.

Is there any way for me to setup Acronis to do this? Specifically:

  1. Clone a drive to another so that if I open both drives they appear exactly the same (no .tib files)
  2. Use a safety net so that if I accidentally delete a file from the source and then run the incremental backup it doesn't delete the file from the destination but rather puts that file in a temporary folder until I run another incremental backup that requires the files in the safety net to be pruned because there is not enough space on the destination?

Let me know if you have any questions. Thanks!

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Dustin, welcome to these User Forums.

Sorry, but the answer to your question here is no.  It is not possible to perform cloning in the way that you have been doing on your Mac.

In Acronis True Image terms, a clone is a 1:1 copy of one drive to another drive with no options for any incremental extras for this process.

See KB 1540: Difference between Backup and Disk Clone for a more detailed explanation of the ways in which these two backup methods work.

Cloning is also an action that cannot be run as a scheduled activity and will often require a reboot / restart of the computer to complete, especially when the target drive already has OS files written to it.  The target of a clone will always be cleared / wiped as the first action of the process.

You can do what you are asking by using Scheduled Backups using an Incremental backup scheme but you will not have the ability to do a simple drive swap without the extra step(s) of recovering the backup to a new drive in the event of a drive failure etc.

Thanks Steve! Very clear explanation. I guess using the Backup method that creates .tib files is the best option. 

The main benefits of using the Backup method is that you can store multiple such backups (depending on size) on a backup drive, this versus the 1:1 relationship of doing a clone.

For anyone else looking for a direct 1:1 drive clone with a safety net I found it. It's called GoodSync. It works differently than Acronis but fits my needs perfectly.