Making space on external backup drive
I used to use Norton Ghost for backup but it does not work on Windows 8 so I purchased True Image 2013 & everything seems OK. Today it could not back up due to target drive being full. Norton used to have a function which showed you which of the back ups it was safe to delete, click them space became available. True Image does not seem to have this functionality, I followed instructions to click recover on Backup & Recovery tab and selected the 7th backup and it told me it would delete all 183 backup points, this can't be correct surely? Is there an easy way to free up some space without deleting everything on the backup disk? By Sod's law as soon as I allow True Image to delete everything I will need to restore the system.
Any advice from experienced users as I am considering dumping Acronis and finding another program which guides you through freeing space as Ghost did. Any one know of such a program if Acronis is not as useful as Ghost was?
Hi, thank you for your prompt response but how do I find the backup task? I went into Browse for Backup looking for *.tib file and I have a sub directory under My Backups called Achronis with 1 full backup done 04/01/2013. Another sub directory called My Documents with files called My Documents_full_b1_s1-V1>23Gb in size plus daily files called My Documents_inc_b1_s10_v1 to s99_v1. A further sub directory called My Partitions with files called My partitions_full_b1_s1_v1 dated 05/01/2013 to My partitions_inc_b1_s8_v1 gated 30/06/2013. Sorry to be so dense but the late lamented Ghost had a support telephone line which put you directly to a technician who remotely accessed my computer and checked if the set up was correct. Shame Acronis wont't talk to anyone without charging a fee.
Backup tasks are listed within True Image, not on the backup disk.
Thank you but I still have no idea where to find a list of safe tasks that I can delete without Acronis wanting to delete all 183 points that are on file. Following what I could make out from the help info I click on the recover button on the Backup & recovery tab, select one of the backups under Data Recovery and click Recover, this brings up a dateline at the bottom of the box the first date being 6th Jan 2013 which says that it is a full backup so I select e.g. the one of 8th Jan and it says that it will delete 183 backups. Where am I going wrong? Ghost was so friendly as when you selected manage destination it would list all the backups that you could safely delete without compromising the security of your backups, click, all gone, free space available on destination drive. With True Image I have a terabyte of backups on the destination drive and have no idea how or which files to delete to give me some space to continue backing up.
What type of backups are these? If they are all incremental backups, then they are all connected.
External date storage drive needs more space
I was told that Acronis would automatically delete the old files on the external drive to make way for the latest backup.....it did not....instead it will not run due to lack of space on the external data storage hard drive ...I am using incremental backups...if I arbitrarily delete a bunch of earlier incremental files...is the link between the original full backup and the latest incremental date distroyed? If I can delete the older incremental files...how do I identify them and how do I delete them? Thanks
Maryanne, please do not arbitrarily delete a bunch of earlier incremental files - doing so will destroy all following incremental files as each one is dependent on all those before it!
It is not recommended to create long chains of incremental backups as this is far more liable to problems later.
I personally would never make more than 5 incremental backups before making a new full backup and starting over again.
If you have multiple chains of backups, i.e. a full backup plus X incremental backups, followed by more sets of the same, then you can remove the oldest full backup chains (full plus X incremental backups).