Validation of thoughts.
With the cost of Pocket USB drives being acceptable, my current thought is to set a FILE level Backup scheme in place that consists of the following.
1. I purchase 3 (three) 1TB WD Pocket drives.
2. I attach them indiviually and format each one in turn. (each one appears as E: as it is connected)
3. I set up a Differential Backup Job "Diff-01" and run this to the first of the 3 Pocket Drives (PD).
4. I set up a Differential Backup Job "Diff-02" and run this to the second of the 3 PD.
5. I set up a Differential Backup Job "Diff-03" and run this to the third of the 3 PD.
So at this stage I have 3 'full' backups all identical.
I take two (the second and third) of those OffSite (to guard against fire or theft).
The Differential Scheme is set to Create a New Full every 10 backups. Only hold 3 full chains. Do NOT delete the First Full Differential.
6. During the next week I take daily Differential backups to the first PD.
7. On Saturday I take the first PD OffSite and return with the second PD.
8. During the next week I take daily Differential backups to the second PD.
9. On Saturday I take the second PD OffSite and return with the third PD.
10. During the next week I take daily Differential backups to the third PD.
This continues in a cyclic fashion.
What I am not clear about is, if this a safe practice, or does it mean that the Differentials I take on the returned (second and third set of) drives do NOT contain a complete set of backups? (since it depends how Acronis determines which files/blocks/sectors have changed since the first Full Differential).
Is there a mechanism to have this validated, as I would NOT like to find that this is NOT an acceptable practice, when faced with a major recovery.
We do much the same with USB 3.0 flash drives - have one for each day of the week and keep the most recent one off site overnight. I've done some backups of a dummy file to see how the system works. If I set up a backup task to be full backup and then incremental backups the program looks to see what is on the USB drive currently attached. If there is no full backup it does a full backup. If there is a full backup it does an incremental backup using the full backup on that drive as the reference, not another full backup that might have been done on another drive at a later time. So that's good and the system works.
So I don't think you need worry about starting off with three full backups and labelling them differently. You don't need three separate backup tasks so each of your drives has its own task.
However....if you can get the cleanup system to delete old backup chains automatically as you hope to you are way ahead of me. If you have clean up turned on the program labours for an eternity trying to 'consolidate' old backups for some reason that defies logic before trying to delete the old chains. You will probaby get an error message that the back up failed and if you look at the log you will see that there is a "failed to open data stream" error.
I posted a question about this on the forum (reprinted below) but got no response from Acronis or anyone. The clean up system doesn't work for me so I've turned it off. Every few weeks I'll manually delete old backup chains from the USB drives. Not using the clean up system gives much quicker backups and they don't 'fail'.
Here is my earlier post in case anyone from Acronis can answer it:
What is consolidation? I've read the manual, KB articles, the forum etc but it makes no sense and my backups are forever failing at the consolidation stage with 'failed to open data stream'. I recreate the task because according to a KB article it had become corrupt again (and again and again).
So what is consolidation? It causes trouble and offers me nothing. It is used when the program is asked to delete old backup series but why the heck are not old backup series just deleted?
If I have full and differential backups and set new full backups every five differentials and if I ask the program to only keep three series why does the program need to consolidate anything about the oldest series before it's deleted? Consolidation wastes time, it causes problems and I don't understand that it does anything useful. Surely a new full back up is 'full' and there is nothing about the oldest backup series that needs to be kept or 'consolidated'.
What don't I understand? Can the troublesome consolidation step be turned off while having the program automatically delete backup series according to number, age or size?
Consolidation does create some challenges (space, time, ...).
Auto-cleaning, however, works wells. In particular, the setting to keep only the X most recent versions has been the most reliable one.
Note that editing a backup task and changing the retention rules is supposed to work, but can produce results that lead to confusion/error at restore time: it is highly recommended to start a new task.