Constantly failing complex backups
Hi everyone,
After weeks, nay months of trying to get this complex backup to work, I am now beginning to doubt my total understanding of this software, or best practises. Certainly I have never had to setup a back scheme so complex, however I have never had a backup so problematic. So, here I am, putting out to you guys and gals, asking for help!
A friend of mine has 2 machines. We call them LH (left hand) PC and RH (right hand) PC as they sit next to one-another, and it makes for easy understanding.
Each PC has a number of large drives, containing various media, mostly photographs (my friend is a photographer and professional Adobe 'Photo-shopper'). We have a new, 10TB Lacie NAS box attached to the network, which both machines can see.
What we require is:
1. A total initial backup of each machines drives;
2. A system image of each machines OS drive;
3. Incremental backups of all data thereafter;
Simple huh? Well I certainly thought so, so why all the problems?!
I have attached screen shots of each of the computers disk setups.
LH PC - needs C (System drive + Data), E (Data) & F (Data) backing up - a LOT of data.
RH PC - needs C (system drive and Data), E, F, G backing up - I think the 'H' Freecom is an external drive that can be missed.
I figured that ideally we would have file backup for each drive, with disk backup for each System drive, but we have tried, and failed, both ways (file and disk) on all drives.
It should be noted that once, we have successfully backed up both computers, albeit separately, and we have never had the scheduler working properly without errors. In fact, the only time I got one to work, was by changing to "differential' backup, which quickly filled the 10GB NAS.
The error message vary somewhat, from failed files creations, to failure to reach source drive, to source drive being full, to Acronis not responding at times.
This is all very frustrating so I am asking if anyone has any better ideas. How would you guys approach this backup plan?! Should we schedule each drive on a different day, as an incremental backup? I can't say that the data is changing on ALL the drives THAT much that it all needs to be monitored 24/7.
We had it set for 1 incremental backup to start one day, and the other the next, and realised that, inevitably, the backups would overlap at some point. Would this cause an issue with this much data? Is it purely the volume of data?!
Any help/advise is greatly appreciated and received, as my friend and I are becoming very frustrated at this now.
Thanks in advance. Sorry this was so long winded, but I have tried to be as thorough and plain-speaking as possible
Thanks for your reply,
We have LH and RH PC connected via Gigabit Network adapters, via a Netgear Nighthawk Router which is Gigabit also. The NAS is a 2Big, with 2 Disks, in a RAID 0 2x 5GB WD RED drives. Budget was a big issue, so the only feasible backup drive was the 2Big as the 5Big's cost 4 figures and up.
I'm not sure what you mean by discrete hard drives I'm sorry?
We are stuck with 10GB at the moment, unless we add another NAS. I'm not sure I understand why the incrementals should fill the drive (which they have) as these only store changes surely? In fact, in the recent past, we have ended up with 50GB + backups daily, with little or no changes on the LH/RG PC disks...
OK, so by discrete drives I mean that each partition is a separate hard drive (as opposed to having multiple partitions on a single hard drive).
Does the RH PC have 5 hard drives (I assume the Scratch File is not on it's own hard drive).
Does the LH PC have 3 separate hard drives?
50GB seems like a lot, but that's less than 1% of your current usage (50/5330=0.9%).
You might be able to reduce the incremental sizes by doing file backups instead of partition, for all but the OS drive.
Methinks you're tasks may be overlapping, any way that you can monitor disk activity and/or the Acronis process to see what the system is doing when the task fails?
I think you would be better off with AB11.5 (the corporate version of True Image). It allows one PC to be considered the master PC and the other one has an 'agent' installed, The 'master' can then schedule all disk/partition images andf files and folders backups.
There is also a greater range of custom backup options, though this can be confusing at first.