Problem: True Image Home 2010 does not really delete data

I see no problem here. In fact, what you expect seems bizarre to me.

If you create a new full backup, deleted files will not exist. As you discovered, an Incremental stores the information that deleted files have been deleted from source.

Of course the older backup, from before you deleted those files, contains those files. Why would it not? At the time you made that backup, those files existed so one would expect them to be part of the backup.

ATI doesn't go back and revise earlier backups (other than consolidation). That would make no sense. A backup image is a snapshot of your system at a point in time. You might want to return to that snapshot, due to issues discovered later. If backups were getting revised all the time, it would defeat the purpose of keeping older backups.

I understand your point perfectly. If you want to keep one backup every week, so that you can decide, if you restore your system to the state of calender week 4 or CW5 or CW6, for it might happen, that you delete something and need it back again some time later, this is a perfectly good solution.

I want to use Acronis NOT as a backup for files I delete by mistake, but only as backup in case of a harddrive failure.

My precious data is on my working disk, once a week I want a snapshot of this data on a second disk, so that in case of a HD failure of my working HD I can restore it. I am absolutely not interested in my data from five weeks ago. I only want the most current data.

I trust myself to decide which files to delete and which not. The system shall NOT protect me from my own stupidity but ONLY from the danger of data loss due to hardware failure.

And as I work with extremely large files, I simply cannot afford enough disk space for the solution, Acronis obviously offers me:

I take pictures with an analog large format camera. The films (4x5 inch) I scan in the highest possible resolution in 16bit color and store them in a TIF file. Some time later I do processing in Photoshop. When the pictures are finished, I safe them in a much smaller JPG file.

1 picture in TIF takes more than 1GB, one picture in jpg takes only about 80MB - 100MB.

Now it occurs quite often, that I scan today and process two weeks later. Acronis stores the scaned TIF files in the archive, e.g. 10 pictures = 10GB.
A week or two later I do the processing and and delete the TIF afterwards. Now the ten pictures leave only 800MB of JPG on my working HD. On my backup HD it will take 10,8GB, for the original 10GB TIF will be stored and the 800MB JPG will be stored in addition.

This is absolutely not what I want. As I have about 200GB of permanent data in this folder and the backup drive is an network attached storage with low transmission speed, I also cannot do full backups weekly, as this will allways take a full day. I really want my backup software to add the new files to the archive and remove the deleted. In my example this would mean, that I only upload the 800MB, then tha 10GB will be deleted and my Archive will become 9,2GB smaller instead of 800MB bigger yet it contains all the information I need to get back to todays (and only to todays) state. 

It seems, that Acronis was the wrong software to buy for my specific problem. Or has anyone a suitable workaround?

You could set ATI to retain just one full backup. Thus, after it creates the latest backup, it would delete the earlier backup. You'd need to allow sufficient disk space for two backups, because ATI will properly not delete the old backup until the new backup is safely created.

Alternatively, you could use ATI's Nonstop backup or Sync features, but I think that would require ongoing access to the external drive.

BTW, 200 GB is not that much. When I backup my drive, which contains my OS, data, and all my music, it's over 460 GB. External storage is inexpensive, so you could just buy a larger external drive. With a 1 TB, you'd easily have room for multiple full backups, or a single full backup plus many incrementals or differentials.

As an alternative, you could use Acronis to do a full backup excluding the folders that contain your tif and jpg files. Then in addition, create a separate file/folder backup that only backs up the jpg files you want to keep. You could also use a utility such as Syncback SE to sync your tif and jpg files using settings that delete the tif files during the sync.

Hi James.

I just changed my folder structure completely to do something similar to your proposal. I'm not perfectly happy, but it works.

Thanks everybody.