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Incremental backup worked a while - but now it wants to create a new full backup

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The options are choosen correct (only use incremental after initial Backup)

About 13 Backups are already written

Now it wants to do a new full backup

Obviously, there is a problem recognizing the former backups (Warning: specified file does not exist)

Backup lies on USB-volume 8TB; the drive letter is always the same

 

Win 8.1, Trueimage 2015 with all updates

I created a system report.

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Hello Andreas,

Welcome to this user forum.

Please download a copy of the Log Viewer App as this can be very useful in helping understand what is happening for your backup task.

I understand that ATIH 2015 offers the option to 'only create incremental backups after the initial full backup' but I would not recommend choosing this option because it can make restoring or recovering your system very much more difficult and time consuming.

When you have a large number of incremental image files, then each and every one of these must be found and must not be damaged or corrupted etc in order for a restore / recovery to be successful.  I a single image in the chain fails then all the following images are no longer able to be used.  Having a very large chain of images increases the risk of a problem.

I would recommend taking a look at the Best Practices Forum and also Grover's True Image Guides which have a lot of very good information and guides on this subject.

I know that and also prefer daily full backup (as on our servers with veeam and LTO-6). However - this machine has more than 5TB to backup and that´s why other strategies are not useful.

 

I´ll have a look at the Log Viewer.

Andreas,

As suggested by MVP STeve above, Give additional thought on the sole use of incrementals. If later on, if any one of the incrementals becomes corrupt for any reason and the backup will not validate, then only the incrementals prior to the corrupt one will be restorable and all newer incrementals from that chain  will be lost with no restoreability.  At the very least, you need to consider having secondary backups for additional coverage.

Andreas

Is the entire system, to include the OS all of the 5TB of storage on a single parition?

If not, here's what I'd do.  Keep the OS separate from the data so that restoring the OS is quick and efficient.  You can take multiple backups as often as you need.   Have a secondary backup using differentials where the fulls run on opposite days (Monday and Thursday).  Ensure that Volume Shadow Copy / System Protection is turned on too.  This gives you lots of recovery options from within Windows, but they also get saved to your backups too!) 

For the rest of that 5TB data, is that all one parition, drive, folder, etc?  I'm guessing not.  Break it up into smaller backup jobs as well and have those run at different times / frequencies.  Be sure to enable Volume Shadow Copy / backup protection on these drives too - having those snapshot restore point allows you to recover files/fodlers really well too. 

- Cloud backup can be painfully slow, but in your case, it might make sense to have a pre-seeded storage unit sent to Acronis and then seed daily incrementals to the cloud as well.  The cloud backup method only backs up the changes from original data - EVER and is using block level scanning to only grab the changed data.  I'm sure recovery would be painfully slow if you had to recover all 5TB (heck, even several 100GB), but better to have slow recovery than no recovery.  

Incrementals are great, but they've let me down.  I know always have one backup job with incrementals and a secondary same job wiht differentials (diffs don't run quite as often though).  

Of course, a NAS or other storage device would be great for these secondary backups as well, but that can be costly.  For a secondary backup, backup... a single cheap enterprise 8TB drive or 8TB WD in an enclosure (or at least a 2bay personal NAS) would still provide some additional secondary backup.