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Delete old Backups and parts of incremental Backups

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Hi,

 

I have several incremental Backups of different folders. I start with full backup, 3-6 incremental, another full, 3-6 incremental and so on.

I enanbled old version cleanup. But i dont understand it really. What does "store no more than 3 recent version chains" exactly mean? How many chains are stored and is a chain incl.  the full backup before or after start or what?

When click on edit settings for a specific backup, it takes A FULL MINUTE before the window is opening, that isnt normal, is it?

Because of space, i would like to delete specifi files or chains, i should not use the windows explorer. BUT HOW can i delete just a single backup in a chain or a full backup in a chain without deleting the HOLE Backup? I cant find the option for deleting anything here.

That´s it for now. Thanks for your help.

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There are several ways to approach this problem.

  1. Use the automatic cleanup rules to manage your backups - see more below.
  2. Create a new set of backup tasks and point these to new backup folders, then remove the settings for the old tasks.  You can then delete any of the old backups created by those tasks using Windows Explorer without problem.  Note: you can use the clone settings option to duplicate your existing tasks - this will create a new task with the same name but prefixed with (1).  
  3. Keep the current tasks, delete unwanted backups via Windows Explorer then perform a Validation for each task to reconcile the status of the remaining backup files with the information held in the Acronis Database.

A backup version chain is defined as being all the files created by a specific backup version sequence, this will include 1 Full backup and your 3-6 Incremental backups.  These files will all show the same backup sequence identifier, i.e. _b1_ in their file names.

When you configure automatic cleanup to store no more than 3 recent version chains, you would then have the files for three backup sequences, i.e. _b1_ & _b2_ & _b3_  (your sequence may be much higher if you have been running these tasks for a long time, i.e. b25,26,27 etc.).

Automatic cleanup only deletes old backup version chains after the next backup version chain has been successfully started by a new full backup file.  So in you example above, Backup version b1 will only be deleted when new full backup b4 has been created successfully.