Backup Plan Question (single Full -> rolling incrementals/differentials for 30 days after)
Our network speed isn't the best. What I want to be able to do is take a single full backup and then never send another full backup over the WAN again. The base backup would be fairly large, but the daily backups would be very small - maybe a few MB's each.
The backup scheme would look very simple:
Full Backup
Differential x 30
The difficulty I'm running into is that I can't seem to get a solid answer on whether or not the backups roll or not. Meaning that when the 30 day retention period is up, I don't know whether or not the oldest daily backup will just delete flatout or if it will merge itself into the full backup.
Can anyone provide some clarity on this and possibly how to set a backup plan to do this?
With differentials, you may chose in cleanup options - whether to consolidate the first differential into the new full or delete it (with incrementals you have no such options, i.e. as all other backups depend on the first incremental, you can't delete it alone). But mind that differentials, unlike incrementals, will grow over time.
Be a little careful. I am using a Full/14 day incremental and have hit a few "oddities":
1) When the retension rules kick in it actually merges the full with the incremental. It apprears to do this by dragging both the full and the incremental to the to the backup server, merging them and than storing the merged version back at the destination. Incrementals take a very short time to do and are very small but when the retension rules kick in they take as long as a full backup. You will essentially be dragging a full down the WAN every time the retension rules kick in.
2) There have been several times, for reasons yet un-answered, that even though a "incremental" is running a full is the result. This problem has filled up my destination NAS more than once.
Maybe both are a bug in BR10 but Acronis has yet to come up with an answer .....
If this is actually the case then it's exactly the opposite of what I want to do. It would theoretically take more time to consolidate the backups than it would to just take a fresh full backup.
Thanks for the info.