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Ready to Start with Acronis and Afraid to Pull Trigger

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Bought Acronis yesterday to help with my backups. I am a professional photographer and have a large amount of files to backup. I have been using Sync Toy to do this for the last 10 years and just want something a little better. I have a WD My Cloud 4 TB (RAID 1) running through my router and a 4 TB (X Drive) backup drive in my computer plus an external drive that I have been backing up my pictures on also. I also have a third drive (D Drive) in my computer that I have been doing an image of my C drive using Windows backup. My WD Cloud and my 4TB internal backup drives are about 47% full.

My C drive (1TB SSD) I use for frequently used images and ones that I am actively editing only.

That all being said what I want to do is backup what I am doing on the C Drive to each of the other drives leaving what is on the other drives and changing any files that have been edited. Sync Toy called it "Contribute" and allowed me to run a preview before I actually ran the backup so I could see what was going to happen. What I want to happen is to add to my backup drives what additions and/or changes from my C Drive or what ever location as I choose as my "Source drive".

What advanced options do I need to set to do this? I am petrified that I am going to overwrite or delete files.

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Raleigh, welcome to these public User Forums.

Some important points to start off here:

First, all Acronis True Image backups are stored in a special archive type file using a .TIB file extension which can only be opened by using ATI.  This is important because reading your opening comments above, the nearest that ATI comes to what you have already been doing, is using Windows Backup to make an image of your C: drive.

ATI can perform 2 separate types of backups schemes. 

Disk & Partitions backup schemes capture data at a disk sector level, as needed to recover from a disk drive failure where key data is locked by the Windows OS during operation.

Files & Folders backup schemes capture data at a files & folders level, therefore are not suitable for OS files & folders, but work best with user data such as your photographic images etc.

All ATI Backup Schemes always create an initial Full backup image archive containing all of the data selected as the backup Source.

Further execution of the Backup Schemes can create a choice of different types of image archives - this can be further Full backup files, Incremental or Differential backup files, this dependent on the type of scheme chosen.  All of these backup files are .TIB archive files.

These archive .tib files can be stored on any of your available storage drives and will not overwrite any existing data on those drives, though the backup task will fail if there is insufficient free space to accommodate the file being created.

ATI also provides a Synchronisation feature but this does not work like your Sync Toy program, in that this is intended to synchronise either to another PC or to the Acronis Cloud - it does not sync to a storage drive.

I would strongly recommend reading some of the information provided in the ATI 2019 User Guide, and in particular, the Getting Started and Basic Concepts chapters of the guide, which will help you to understand the capabilities of this application.