Maximum usable HDD size for Acronis TI 2019
Hello. I've been using Acronis TI 2019 happily for the past two years. I use it to make FULL System Disk Backups every month for general Backup and Recovery purposes. I've been contentedly using the same 1 TB USB external HDD for the past two years for just this purpose. However, as the size of my System Disk has grown exponentially over the years, so have the size of my FULL System Disk Backups. At first, I was able to get about 12 FULL Backups on my 1 TB HDD before I had to start deleting the oldest Backups. Lately, I'm getting about 6-7 FULL Backups on the same Drive (I'll probably get fewer in the future). I obviously need a bigger external HDD. Can someone please tell me the maximum size external HDD that Acronis TI 2019 can safely use/support for Backup purposes? I can't seem to find this info anywhere. Anyone's help would be much appreciated. Thanks!


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Robert, you could also consider whether you are backing up more than needed. Are you running with the usual exclusions? Have you cleaned up your drive? Do you have a Windows.old folder sitting around.
My experience has been that once most of the programs are installed, the system disk does not grow "exponentially", not even linearly. But this is also because I keep most of my data on a data drive separate from the system drive. Have you looked into that?
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Steve Smith wrote:.....
If you have an older PC using Legacy / MBR partition scheme, then the maximum size is 2TB.
If you have a newer PC using UEFI / GPT partition scheme, then it can handle drives of sizes that are not yet available or would be extremely expensive!
See webpage: FAQ: Drive Partition Limits
As I understand it, when using Legacy rather than UEFI, the boot disk must use MBR, however, other disks can use GPT (provided the OS supports GPT disk - for Windows I think to goes back to Windows 7 at least). I have an ancient AMD based system (goes back to about 2014) and I have been successfully using internal drives larger than 2TB with GPT for data files - including two 8TB Seagate HDD, and 6 4TB WD drives. Video files take up a LOT of storage.
Ian
Update: Some SATA controllers and USB docks/ESB Drives may have upper limit on disk size supported. My Orico 4 Disk USB claims only to support drives up to 3TB.
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Steve Smith, BrunoC and IanL-S, thank you All for your responses and advice. I never thought about Acronis Backups being dependent upon the Windows OS and it's partition scheme. Thanks for pointing this out. However, since I prefer simplicity and stability in all matters, I'll probably take the advice of using a max. 2TB Backup drive--just to be on the safe side.
However, on a different note, is it possible to to make FULL System Backups for ONE Computer on multiple SIMILAR external hard drives or does Acronis TI 2019 only allow ONE series of Backups to be done on ONE singular Hard Drive alone? Putting Backups on separate but "similar" Drives aids in redundancy and also allows for a lot more mileage to be gotten out of each individual Drive. I'm aware of the Acronis Golden 3-2-1 Backup rule which advises User's to "Store your copies in at least 2 ((different?)) types of storage media (local drive, network share/NAS, tape drive, etc.)" but there in no mention of backing up to two separate but "similar" storage devices. Would Acronis TI 2019 accept this scenario or would this cause problems for the Program and it's Backups and Recoveries? Can anyone please answer this, I'd be most grateful...Thanks.
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Robert J. wrote:However, on a different note, is it possible to to make FULL System Backups for ONE Computer on multiple SIMILAR external hard drives or does Acronis TI 2019 only allow ONE series of Backups to be done on ONE singular Hard Drive alone? Putting Backups on separate but "similar" Drives aids in redundancy and also allows for a lot more mileage to be gotten out of each individual Drive. I'm aware of the Acronis Golden 3-2-1 Backup rule which advises User's to "Store your copies in at least 2 ((different?)) types of storage media (local drive, network share/NAS, tape drive, etc.)" but there in no mention of backing up to two separate but "similar" storage devices. Would Acronis TI 2019 accept this scenario or would this cause problems for the Program and it's Backups and Recoveries? Can anyone please answer this, I'd be most grateful...Thanks.
Providing that you create separate backup tasks for each separate / different external backup HDD's then ATI 2019 should have no issues!
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Steve Smith, thank you again for your input. Your advice and attached KB Article #62741 were most informative. I'll try and implement these steps in the future. Thanks again.
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Robert, once the .tib file is created you can still just copy it over to another drive for redundancy. A copy would probably be faster than running a second backup task and the drives need not be similar. To restore, you could just "Add existing backup" in ATI 2019 to access the copied file.
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