ATI Home 2011 won't do incrementals after a full backup exists.
I'm using Acronis True Image Home 2011, build 6868 with the Plus Pack.
Two months ago I created a large (600gig) encrypted 'file' archive. I spent the last two months creating an offsite backup of this data. (offsite backup uploaded myself, manually). Now, two months after the initial backup, I want to create an incremental and upload that. Most of the data is static, so there's probably only 10-20 gigs that's changed since then.
The .TIB backup file had moved since I had created it, so it wasn't showing up when I ran ATI. So I clicked "browse for backup", and selected the .TIB. Since this is an encrypted backup, it then prompts me for the password. I then enter the correct password. I can then click "restore and recover", and selectively recover files. The files that are recovered are valid. I can also validate the archive, with no errors.
So now I click on "options - recreate backup settings". I set the same files to backup as I had before. Set the same exclusions I had before. I set versioning scheme to "custom - incremental after full". I only want incremental backups after the initial full. Then I click on "backup now", and enter the password. It's starts backing up, but it ends up doing another full backup. This is useless as I've just spent the last 2 months making a copy of the first full backup offsite.
How can I force ATI home 2011 to do an incremental backup when a full backup version already exists? The original backup filename is for example "mybackup.tib". When it creates the 'new' backup that's supposed to be an incremental, but is actually a full backup, it uses the filename "mybackup(1)1.tib". Trying other options, I've had it delete my original backup and start writing to the original filename of "mybackup.tib". Luckly I had a copy of the 2 month old .tib elsewhere.
Any ideas?
Thanks for the reply. I think I understand what your saying, but it doesn't help my particular problem.
I have a 600 gig full backup that's taken me 2 months to copy offsite. I need to create an new incremental based on this full backup. In other versions I could tell ATI to simply "add to previous backup", and browse for the existing full backup that I already sent offsite. I thought the equivalent in ATI home 2011 was simply browsing for the .TIB, then recreating a backup task with the same settings. It knows there's the existing backup, as it asks for a password, and shows the 2 month old full backup date. It also won't let me change the encryption settings (which is good), since it's picking those settings up from the existing backup. Just create a new incremental based on that, it's not that hard.
From what your saying it sounds impossible to create an incremental backup from a previous full backup, when the task has had to have been recreated. I sure hope this isn't true. If so this is a MAJOR bug in ATI. There has to be a workaround for this. When reinstalling windows you commonly have to recreate the backup task. It shouldn't be that hard to say "Here's an existing .TIB file, do an incremental on drive X, based on what's in that .TIB." From what your saying, this can't be done. If this can't be done, I just wasted 2 months, and 600 gigs of outgoing bandwidth. And there's no point in letting it create a new 600 gig backup, and spending another 2 months to move it offsite, if it's so easy to be 'unable' to do incrementals. If for whatever reason I have to reinstall, and have to recreate the backup task, I'll be forced to spend another 2 months uploading. This seems rediculous. For the most part, ATI 2010 was doing what I wanted. I simply upgraded in order to stay current. The new gui certainly seems like a step backwards. I realize it tries to make things easier to do, but everything seems harder to accomplish. Some things not possible. There shouldn't be anything stopping someone from creating a brand new backup task that backs up based on an existing full backup .TIB.
Ryan,
If I understand correctly, the original Full no longer resides in the archive, if this is so, you will not be able to create an incremental, the full must be present for this to occur.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean.
For example, I have "e:\my backups". This contains a 600 gig file "mybackup.tib".
I want to create an incremental based on "mybackup.tib".
That's it. I can't seem to do it.
Ah OK, I thought you meant you had physically copied the full to your offsite location as in copying and then deleting.
Did you select Full when you made the task or incremental? If you selected full, then you will need to make a new task as an incremental and attach the full to that or is that what you are doing and it's failing?
If I'm still wide of the mark, could you post some screenshots on how you've got the task set up?
I manually copied the .tib file offsite so I'd have an offsite copy if I needed. This manual copy took 2 months due to the slow nature of my dsl upstream speeds. Now I want to update the offsite copy.
In the task, under "backup scheme", I set "custom scheme", and backup method "incremental" and "create only incremental versions after initial full".
The existing full backup is (for example), "mybackup.tib". When I run the task, it creates "mybackup(1)1.tib". But it creates a full backup. I can't seem to get it to do an incremental based on the existing full backup. As I mentioned before, the full backup verifies OK. And I can recover files from it manually, so I know the previous backup is good.
Ryan,
Has your drive been defragged in the intervening period or any other process that might have reorganised the disk sectors? If it has this would account for an incremental looking like a full.
So, just so that I'm clear, bear with me - the original task, the one that has created the full, was selected as an incremental.
It's possible the drive has been defragged since the full backup. That was 2 months ago. But this being a "file" backup instead of a partition backup, shouldn't it only look at the files, and which files have changed? If a defrag will affect the sizes of a "file" backup, are you simply not supposed to defrag the disk at any time you have time invested in transporting backups? I had originally wanted to do monthly offsite backups. I also want to keep my disk defragged. With these two factors combined, does that mean my monthly backups are forced to be FULL backups? There's no point in using incremental at all then. Might as well just set it to create a single full backup every month. And since it takes 2 months to transfer the full backup offsite, I'd be forced to physically mail a hard drive containing the full backup every month. I thought I could simply send monthly incrementals, after the inital huge transfer.
I'm fairly sure the original backup was created on incremental. I'm not positive though. It might have been created on the default "version chain scheme", but that still creates an incremental after the initial full. It wouldn't make sense that the original backup method would matter, as if it did, why would you have to recreate a new backup method if the original backup method is stored in the .tib file?
The original backup method is not stored in the file as such, it is stored in the task script, the file does contain information that there might be other links in the chain, but when it comes to actually making an image the task file and database are consulted as far as I know.
As far as defragging is concerned, I was indeed thinking of partition or disk based imaging.
I'm still having a hard time understanding why I can't get an incremental backup then. I used a file backup because the partition I'm backing up is encrypted and therefore not compatible with partition backup.
Is there anything else I can do to force an incremental? Or any logs I can check for as to why it ends up backing up files it's done already? Otherwise I won't be able to do any kind of offsite backup. Since I've already used the bandwidth to do the first full backup, not being able to continue would be a shame.
Aha, encrypted files - TIH has difficulty with TrueCrypt containers, it will sometimes (with images) revert to a type of sector by sector. I wonder if it has that result on images if it has the same problem with files that are encrypted.
The normal advice is to unencrypt disks for imaging purposes. I suggest unencrypt a 10 files or so, make temporary task the smae as you did for your 'live ' task, then add in or alter a file - leave it unencrypted and see what result you get.
Ahh, I don't understand. Truecrypt does transparant encryption. I'm not backing up the encrypted partition; if I was, sector by sector would be my only option. I'm doing a file backup of files that are transparantly decrypted by truecrypt. So as far as ATI is concerned, it's getting unencrypted files. There are no truecrypt containers at all. I have the entire partition encrypted. Then the partition is mounted with transparant de/encryption. Once mounted, it behaves like any other drive. I don't know how I would "unencrypt" the files, besides copying them to a regular hard drive. But since it's transparant encryption, ATI is reading 'plaintext', so there'd be no difference. There's more cpu overhead with ATI reading off of a truecrypt partition, but that should be it. I'm also getting ATI to encrypt on its end as well, so there's truecrypt doing the transparant decryption, the file exists in memory decrypted. Then ATI encrypts it as it adds it to the archive.
I'm going to do some tests on a subset of the files that exist on the truecrypt partition. Compared to files that exist on a regular partition.
Maybe the number of files is a problem. I know I had to cut down the number of individual files on the drive to get ATI to successfully complete a file backup of the drive at all. Before I removed some of the files I got an error code related to the fact there were too many files. The full backup completed this time, but I wonder if there's still a file count problem. There's currently 384,000 files, and 8,800 directories.
Even my simple test is not working.
Regular non-encrypted hard drive. 1.5 gigs of files in "d:\stuff".
Create a files backup task to backup "d:\stuff". Set encryption, and custom / incremental only. Backup location is "f:\my backups\stuff.tib".
Create backup no problem.
Remove task from list. Close ATI, and re-open ATI.
Browse for backup. Select "f:\my backups\stuff.tib". Enter password when prompted. Click "operatons - recreate backup settings", and select only "d:\stuff". Set same settings as before. Incremental backups only selected.
Click backup now. "f:\my backups\stuff.tib" is DELETED, and "f:\my backups\stuff1.tib" is created as a FULL backup.
If this simple example won't work, I don't know how I'll ever get my 600gig backup to do incrementals. It seems True Image was never meant for incrementals if it won't even do my simple task. I think I've just wasted 600gigs of outgoing bandwidth. I don't think I'll ever be able to update it. ATI doesn't want to do any kind of incremental file based backup, so there's no point uploading another full. It's funny because what I want to do is really quite simple. I have a .TIB file that contains a file backup of other files. Create another .TIB that only contains new / changed files based on the first .TIB. It's not that hard. It seems it can't do it though. Even compression programs like .ZIP and .RAR can do that!
I can only suggest contacting Acronis support with your problem, I have no further ideas at the moment.
I think the problem is that you remove the task and recreate a new one. BTW, if it were for ATi a successful full backup, it would be stuff(1).tib not stuff1.tib.
What happens is that ATI does a full backup but the rename file at the end fails (It should be renamed from stuff1.tib to stuff.tib).
Also, if you have a version chain backup, this will create first 2 fulls before the first incremental.
Yes, I'm sure that the task recreation is what's causing the full backup. My point is that it should handle that. ATI home 2010 did no problem. I could install ati from scratch and have it make an incremental. This behavior of 2011 is mind boggling. I imagine there's multiple reasons one might have to recreate the backup task. The major reason I can see, and the reason I had to, was a windows reinstall. I had wanted to do incremental backups every month and not have to do a second full for at least a year, if not longer. I think it likey that for one reason or another, you'd end up having to recreate the backup task in that timeframe. When that occurs, that means another 2 months of uploading.
What's sad is that winrar will do exactly what I want with no fuss. I just have to extract my existing full backup to a second hard drive, make sure all files don't have the archive bit set, then update the just extracted files with current ones. Then create a Rar archive from the updated files, in including only files with the archive bit set. This will create an archive that only contains files that have changed since my first full offsite backup. Subsequent incrementals are created the same way. No dependence on tasks or when you need to reinstall windows.
I'm regretting the upgrade to 2011 since I'm sure 2010 would allow you to create incrementals even if you had to recreate the backup task.