Automatic cleanup rules: Keep size of the backup no more than does not work
Hello,
maybe I just don't understand this option correctly, but "Keep size of the backup no more than" at Custom schemes does not work for me.
- I set up a test folder with some files (about 100 mb)
- I set up a file backup (incremental) in TI
- I set the "Custom schemes" to limit the backup size to 1 gb, a full backup every 24 versions, every hour
- then I duplicated the files - so I got 200mb now - and run a backup in TI manually (I don't have time to wait an hour)
- I did that a couple of times so that my backup size would hit the 1gb limit
- I deleted some files from my test folder while I added files to be sure that the absolute size from my files does not exceed 1gb
after hitting the size limit with my backup nothing happens, no consolidation or error. At this time I had a full backup with 100mb, and a couple of incremental backups with a size from about some kilobytes to 50mb. My backup size (meaning the size from all backups for this test folder together) just grow beyond the 1gb limit.
Does this option work for you? Any hints how this option works exactly? Needless to say, I read the manual...
Thanks
Sorry for my unclear explanation. What I meant was that I duplicated my files which should be IN the backup. In other words my files which should be backuped are growing.
I tried a lot today, I guess the problem is that it doesn't work with incremental backups.
I expected that TI consolidate the oldest incremental backup with the last full backup until the size from the the while backup falls under the size limit, when the whole backup hits the limit.
What a pity that ATM doesn't work with hardlinks like Time Machine or rsync does.
I guess the problem is that it doesn't work with incremental backups.
It does work with incremental backups.
What a pity that ATM doesn't work with hardlinks
I don't know what that means.
>> It does work with incremental backups.
It doesn't work in my tests here. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I can't see a fault.
When I use incremental backups the size limit just don't work. There is no consolidation or anything when I exceed the limit. With differential of full backup it works more or less fine.
>>>I don't know what that means.
It's a solution to copy only incremental changes, but get full backups everytime. Every backup would also only grow by the size from the incremental changes due to hardlinks. It would be also easy to just delete the oldest backup when the size limit is exceeded this way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Machine_%28Mac_OS%29#How_it_works
Your folder size limit would need to be large enough to contain a full chain of incrementals plus two full backups. Setting a too-low limit could cause failure if it conflicts with the other options you set for the chain.
Your folder size limit would need to be large enough to contain a full chain of incrementals plus two full backups. Setting a too-low limit could cause failure if it conflicts with the other options you set for the chain.
Thanks tuutle,
I guess that was the problem. I will try that.
Using TI to backup my 2tb data HDD is very space consuming that way, I need at least 4,5 tb (4tb for 2 full backups + 500 gb for incremental ) to have a good backup history. I haven't tried, but I guess that's also very performance decreasing to make full backups very often.
I which there was a more clever solution, like the one described for time machine in the link above. With this method there is no need to make a full backup ever again after the first time, while having snapshots for all incremental changes too.
One option would be to exclude large, infrequently changed and relatively uncompressible files from the .tib backups.
For example, in my regular ATI full disk backups I exclude music files: .flac; .mp3; etc. I backup the music files with Robocopy, which creates file-based backups rather than compressed archives. I created a batch file that runs Robocopy, compares my music files with the current mirrored backup and then backs up only those new or changed, and deletes any that I deleted from the source. Robocopy is multi-threaded, and I specify the use of 16 threads, so it's quite fast.
When a consolidation is to take place there must be enough free space on the storage drive to contain the complete archive as it is duplicated during the consolidation. In other words TI makes a copy of the archive as it consolidates and then deletes the previous archive.