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Advice on Backups to Multiple USB Drives

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Hello, I would like to ask for some advice on enhancing my backup strategy! First, some background: I currently take a full image backup of our home computer nightly and back it up to a 6TB USB drive. Due to large media files, I can fit 6 backups on the USB drive. I would like to enhance my backup plan by adding a second 6TB USB drive to the mix and swap between the two drives. In other words, use drive #1 for 6 days, switch to drive #2 and use it for 6 days, then back to drive #1, etc. Why? Two reasons: (1) I would take one drive to work in the event of a fire destroying the drive at our house, (2) I would like tighter protection against ransomware. If I get hit with ransomware and don't realize it for a few days, at least one previous week's worth of backups are protected because they aren't even connected to my system. I do use Acronis' cloud backup, but only for a limited subset of files. The most secure files and large video files I don't send to the cloud for $$ savings. So that would partly protect in the fire situation but not 100%. Would love any advice, especially from anyone who's tried this, on how to set it up. Do I need to even make any adjustments at all? When I swap drives, will the backup software just run as normal and delete the oldest backup as it normally would? Would love any insights you guys have!

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Welcome to these public user forums.

First statement:  ATI is not designed to work with any single backup task backing up to more than one destination drive.  The key rule is 'one drive per one task'.

If you want to use and rotate between two different backup drives, then you need to create a second backup task to write to the second backup drive, then run the appropriate task when the correct drive is connected.

There have been regular topics posted here in the forums both recently and over the years on this same subject, with varying solutions offered.

See the following resources:

KB 62741: Acronis True Image: rotating backup destination disks requires separate backup plans per destination disk

Topic: Acronis Backup (BU) Using Rotating USB Drives

Topic: Backup fails when one of two external hard drives is not connected.

Topic: External USB drive not detected after nightly rotation

Topic: Make Backup when external HDD is connected