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Which backup strategy recommendable

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I use Acronis True Image 2021 and struggle with the question which backup strategy is meaningful.

"incremental" is out of question for me. But than "1 complete version after 5 incremental"? And if so, what kind of cleaning of old versions?

Is there an expert who can share with me his backup sceem?

Thanks a lot!

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Origando, any backup strategy will depend on the individual user requirements and storage options.

One starting point would be to read through the ATI 2021 User Guide: Basic Concepts section which will help you understand the different backup options and explain the differences between the schemes you can use.

The next reference document to direct you to is the Acronis web article on Backup best practises! This discusses the best approach to backup strategy that uses the 3-2-1 scheme that you will see recommended in these forums.

Incremental backups typically are the most efficient in terms of space utilisation, as each backup 'slice' (incremental backup) only captures the changes detected since the prior backup was created.  Since ATI 2020, all new Disk backups use .tibx files where all the incremental slices are stored within a single .tibx file.  Files & Folders backups still use .tib files and both incremental and differental backups are stored in separate .tib files.

For my own backups, I do use incremental backups but limit these to the default scheme numbers in most cases, i.e. make a new full backup after creating 5 incremental backups.  I also make backups of the same data to other locations, i.e. to a local HDD, to an external USB HDD, to my NAS storage, and to the Acronis Cloud - this is so that I have no single point of weakness in the strategy and can recover vital data from any of the locations.  It is better to have too many backups than to have too few!

Good morning Steve,

thanks a lot. This is more than I expected.

I think I will follow the idea of the 3-2-1 scheme using my QNAP server and an external drive.