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Reinstall windows & keep online backups of data drives?

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I have a Windows 10 system that needs to have Windows reinstalled/reset. The system has multiple TB of data on multiple internal drives. All drives are backed up locally and online, with independent backups for each drive. All the OS and applications and home directories are on the C: drive, and all other data on the D:, E:, etc. drives. I want to hand-reinstall the OS and all the applications (including Acronis) on the C: drive from scratch without restoring the old, corrupt image. But I would like to do this in a way that when I set up Acronis TI again, I will be able to adopt the online backups for the data drives, which will not have been touched. I messed this up last time and it takes forever to re-backup TBs of data. Is there a right way to do this? Thanks.

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Robert, welcome to these public User Forums.

Given your description above where you have separate disk backups of each of your disk drives and have kept all your OS, applications etc on the C: drive, then you are in a good position to do what you are asking.

ATI 2020 has an option on the main Settings page for 'Backup settings transfer' where you can save your settings to a zip file or later import back those settings, but there are limitations to that option, i.e. it does not preserve your activity history etc.

The approach that I would recommend would be as follows:

Use the above option to save your settings to a zip file.

Next, make a backup copy of the C:\ProgramData\Acronis folder structure at a point when you know that you will not be running any more of your backup tasks.

Make a note of any schedules you have for your backup tasks as this detail will be lost and will need to be manually set again.

Do your clean install of Windows 10 and applications etc but before you install ATI 2020 again, copy back the C:\ProgramData\Acronis folder structure again, so that the install of ATI will pick up all the data from your old tasks etc, including history, activity etc.

Note: after reinstalling Windows, your ATI backup task for your C: drive will need you to reselect the Source disk / partitions as the identifiers for this drive / partitions will have been changed by doing the clean install of Windows.  I would recommend making a new clean backup of the C: drive rather than trying to continue any older backup task - this because of the degree of change that has taken place.

Your backups of the other drives should be able to continue as before.

OK, so I've followed this procedure. Generally it worked well, except for one glitch, possibly my fault. While I was able to adopt the old backups, I also needed to grant my newly-created account full control of all the files in on the drive, which I did with a recursive icacls command. This (I assume it was this) resulted in Acronis wanting to re-backup everything. Clearly this is going to take a while, but still, this result is far superior to my previous effort, because this time I don't have to juggle space on the Acronis server to avoid crossing the 5TB limit, instead it is just systematically refreshing all the individual files in place. FYI/FWIW, and thanks for your help.

Robert, glad to hear that you have been able to do what you wanted here and all is looking better now.  Thanks for the feedback.