Can someone please tell me which of these two backup schedules is better?
G'day,
Just wondering if someone can please look over the couple of options I have for a backup schedule and let me know which one is better. I recently lost a few weeks worth of changes in some important documents I was working on. I was doing a plain filesystem copy to USB drive once a month, but I had a blue screen 3 weeks into a new month, and after chkdsk ran a few of my documents were corrupted and could not be recovered, so I purchased True Image 2012 to get a better backup schedule in place. I've read through Grover's excellent guides and I think I have most of the options figured out, however I'm stumped by the most efficient way to get the backup schedule I'm looking for and was hoping someone could check my maths and tell me which way is the best.
I have an 80GB SSD as my Operating System (Windows 7) drive where all my programs are installed and a 500GB HDD as a drive for documents and storage of installation media, and they are both at around 80% full. I have just performed a full backup of both disks, it was 364GB and took several hours to complete.
I would like to keep a rolling backup schedule of the last 2-3 months worth of data. The files do not change much on a day-to-day basis, mostly editing Microsoft Office documents. So I thought the differential backup plan would be suitable rather than using incrementals. I saw on another post that a ballpark figure for estimating differentials on a filesystem that doesn't change much is 100MB for every 15GB, so I figure around 2.5GB for my 364GB backup (please let me know if this is way off).
- Backup schedule #1 (3 version chains of 28 days worth of data)
Backup method: Differential
Create a full version after every 27 differential versions
Store no more than 3 recent version chains
Schedule: Daily at 8:30pm
= Needs space for 4 full backups (3+1) and 81 differentials (27x3)?
= (4 x 364GB) + (81 x 2.5GB) = 1658.5GB
OR
- Backup Schedule #2 (12 version chains of 7 days worth of data)
Backup method: Differential
Create a full version after every 6 differential versions
Store no more than 12 recent version chains
Schedule: Daily at 8:30pm
= Needs space for 13 full backups (12+1) and 72 differentials (6x12)?
= (13 x 364GB) + (72 x 2.5GB) = 4912GB
Backup schedule #2 seems to be the one used in examples and other posts, but it seems to require a lot more storage space in my situation than schedule #1. Am I totally missing something?
Thanks in advance for the assistance!
While both methods look good there is a gotcha to doing it both ways. Once you restore anything, the database gets confused and starts adding to the existing differentials.
I have been creating full backups for 7 days and the only reliable way to do this was to create a master folder, create 7 sub folders, create 7 jobs in Acronis and point each job to one of the sub folders. You can't even put them into the same folder because the database gets confused, and starts saving job names with what looks like a registry setting in the name.
I've been using Acronis as far back as 2010 and it's always did this, and it's a known issue. It's just frustrating.