NonStop Backup to the Cloud mimicked using Incremental backup and Cloud Synchronization - experiences
I recently upgraded to ACRONIS TRUE IMAGE HOME 2014 (ATI 2014). I had been an Acronis customer for many years (prior to rebranding of the software to ATI).
First, I was not able to get nonstop backup to work reproducibly. I tried this both backing up to an external USB drive and to the Acronis Cloud. I have a pending support case on this topic. I had wanted to backup two disk partitions, with a total size between 500 and 600 GB. This turned out to be a challenge for nonstop backup.
In particular the nonstop backup service kept crashing (not stopping, but crashing).
I wish I had more information on how this is all put together, however I assume the nonstop backup service simply manages the an incremental backup where initially the backup time increment is 5 minutes. It also manages consolidation on a weekly basis, and when the Acronis cloud is involved invokes synchronization.
In other words, one should be able (in principle) to approximate what nonstop backup does using the existing tools provided by Acronis. Of course an increment of 5 minutes is not available.
I set up an incremental backup with a 2 hour increment and once the initial full backup was done, synchronized my backup to the cloud. I set the file size to be 650 MB which overcomes some file size limitations on synchronization.
I am happy to report that for the most part this worked really well, after some 'growing/setup pains', especially with synchronization. Like nonstop backup, synchronization is delicate. It is controlled by a series of metadata files (xml mostly) which cannot be reset very well. Initially I had to reinstall the product and delete what had moved to the cloud to get this to be correct. I am sure the metadata files could be manually manipulated but there is a HUGE lack of documentation. In particular, even with rebooting, ATI 2014 reported I was synchronized when I was not. (I had stopped, restarted and moved what I was synchronizing during my experimentation. I assume the metadata was way out of sync).
I believe (but do not know for a fact) there is metadata stored in the cloud (or inside a local database) which repopulates the xml even if it is deleted. I finally renamed the local FOLDER where the files I wanted to get synchronized lived (ie. the backup) and reset synchronization to this new folder. That fixed my final problem
I have yet to restore from the cloud (this mean downloading the files and creating a disk clone); I will attempt that in the next couple of weeks.
One major annoyance. Consolidation does not let you choose the file size of the resultant .tib files. My consolidated (and compressed) backup was over 200 GB. There is no way I can upload to the cloud (it complains). I could split the file with zip (or a similar tool), but that is a pain, especially if I have to recover.
You could use an increment of 5mn using the Windows task scheduler instead of the Acronis scheduler.
Thanks Pat. That is a good idea. Ideal of course would be if Acronis were to 'fix' nonstop backup once and for all. There have been issues since it was first released. Perhaps improved error reporting and possibly more hooks...but then again it was meant to be a one click approach. The cloud online interface is lacking but I assume that will improve overtime . What I noticed is that the information is misleading (in fact way off) until the synchronization has finished. This includes files transferred and usage (of course each time you want an 'update' you have to refresh your browser). I noticed transferring 300+ small files (650 MB) takes significantly less than than about 50, 4 GB files. Presumably because of aborted transfers due to errors. Better statistics would be a nice "would like to have feature".