backing up to multiple places?
After having gone traumatic restoration of a crashed drive- successfully, thank God- I'm now wondering about the following.
If I do a backup chain to 2 different drives- say, my external drive and a 2nd internal drive- and for each, I do a series of incrementals-- can I presume these don't interfere with each other?
I might like to do an incremental (or full after a certain number of incrementals) to one drive one day- then backup to the other drive the next day. This way, if for example, I had trouble with the external drive (which I don't now)- I could try restoring from the 2nd internal drive.
I recall doing backups in the '90s with tape drives. I never really understood the process but I thought that when the backup was accomplished- it set flags on those files so it would know not to back them up again.
I vaguely recall asking about this flagging system here years ago and was told that's not how Acronis works. I presume then, that Acronis doesn't set any flags or write anything to the backed up drive- all info it needs is in the .tib file- and therefore, backing up to multiple drives, rotating them from day to day, is not going to cause problems.
Joe
This will explain more about the steps needed for using two different drives.
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/64634
To backup to multiple destination drives, create multiple separate backup tasks, one per destination.
To backup to multiple destination drives, create multiple separate backup tasks, one per destination.
Tuttle and Grover, yes, that's what I've been doing- 2 separate tasks- each is stored in its own directory - one on the external drive and one on the 2nd internal drive. What I don't quite understand is how Acronis "knows" which files are new and different, if say, I'm doing an incremental chain. I think it used to be that backup programs (many years ago) would set a flag on the file it is new or changed. Apparently, Acronis doesn't do that. I presume that Acronis must have to compare the existing backup chain with the drive to see what is new and/or different. If it doesn't compare the drive with the existing chain, how can it know what is new or changed? Or does it look for file dates- so that any file with a new or changed date after the last .tib file in a chain- will be included in the incremental- or if it's a differential chain, then it looks for any new dates after the full backup?
Since the backup chains don't interfere with each other- I also create backup tasks for more specialized purposes- one for all my photo/video stuff, and another just for my MS Office files.
This question is more about my curiosity than a need to know. I once taught myself the "C" programming language and I really liked it- so I have some sense of what's going on behind the scenes- so I'm curious how some features of programs actually work.
Joe
For disk/partition backups, ATI looks for disk sectors that have changed.