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Advice on my backup strategy

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Hi,

I am new to ATIH 2012. Previously I had ATIH 9.0 and it saved me big time when my Windows XP drive blue screened on me and I was never able to boot up that drive again.

Rather than try and get my old XP OS back I decided to upgrade my machine and just move the data from my backup drive to my new Windows 7 machine. That all worked out well and I was able to use ATIH 2012 to read my verision 9.0 archive and get all of my old data back.

My backup strategy on my old machine was to do a full backup to a USB drive and then just have Acronis run scheduled incremental backups to the USB drive every other night. When the USB filled up I would deltete everything and do another full backup and start the process over.

That is how I set up my new USB drive. Full back up and then incremental backups every evening.

It occured to me that there is a small risk in my current process. If my hard drive were to die after I deleted the old archive I would be without any backup. While the chances of this happening seem small it also seems kind of naive to think that it couldn't happen. I suppose it might be a good idea to have a 2nd USB drive and do a full backup to it prior to deleting my old archive. Then I could delete the old archive and do a full backup to backup drive #1 and do incrementals on it until it fills up and so on.

Should I get a 2nd USB drive for this? I still have my old 280 gb drive form the XP machine but I was hanging onto that one in case there is something I forgot to bring over to the new machine.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions and thanks to everyone that has been responding to my recent posts.

Steve

0 Users found this helpful

You should swith to a backup strategy where you create a new full backup after a limited Y number of incrementals.
Each set of one full with the following incrementals is called a chain.
Set ATI to store no more than X recent backup chains.
You need enough space for [X times (1 full + Y incrementals)] + one full
For a daily backup, you could set Y to be 6. You will get a new full every week.
For a weekly backup, you could set Y to be 3. You will get a new full every month or so.

Thanks for the feedback.

I set it to 6 like you suggested.

When it creates a new full backup should I delete the previous chain after it finishes?

Steve

If you set the task up to keep only x numberof "recent version chains", the program will do the deletion without any need for you to do manual deletes of any chains.

Thanks!!!!!!!

You may also find this link helpful plus there is good help for 2012 version along the left margin under "Useful Links."
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/28705