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Automatically delete old backups when it runs out of space?

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I have Acronis True Image 2016 on Windows 10. I want it to do incremental backups, but if there's not enough space to back up changed files, then it should automatically delete old backups until it has enough space to continue. (Like Time Machine works on a Mac.)

How do I set ATI up to do this? It seems that all of the backup options fail when they run out of space, unless I micromanage them with Automatic Cleanup. "Create a full version after every X incremental versions." No, I don't want to have to keep creating full versions. "Keep size of the backup no more than X gb." No, I don't care how big it gets, I only care if it runs out of space.

If ATI doesn't support this, then where can I submit it as a feature request?

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The best place to make a "new feature" request would be in this forum. Create a thread that starts with "[Suggested New Feature]" which is likely to attract the attention of those who can advance such a request. Before doing so, it is important to work out exactly what you want.

The problem I see is in how should Acronis decide which backups to delete. If there is only one backup task, then that is easy; delete *.tib files for that backup. If there are many backup tasks, it becomes very complex, particularly if the media on which the backups are stored is shared (for example a NAS). An automated process would have to be limited to backups with regular schedule, rather than those that a manual. Then we need to decide if full backups, incremental backups and differential backups require different rules.

You do not like a process that involves both full and differential/incremental backups. You apparently want a full backup followed by a long sting of incremental/differential backups. While I have successfully created long chains with incremental/differential backups with both ATI and Norton Ghost, it is a process with significant risks. If one increment file is corrupt, or becomes corrupt for some reason, the whole chain fails (from that point on). For this reason I always verify after creation and have regularly scheduled verification of backups.

Ian

Thinking in terms of "full" / "differential" / "incremental" is old-fashioned. Look at the way that Mac OS's Time Machine does it: every backup looks like a "full" backup, because if a file hasn't changed then the backup points to the previous backup's copy of that file. Delete the oldest backup, and the individual files still exist if newer backups still point to them. Think in terms of Unix/Linux's "hard links" (where a file maintains a count of how many places link to it, and only when the last link gets deleted is the file itself deleted), except that Mac OS creates its own "sparseimage" filesystem inside of a container so that it can store the backup on a fileserver that doesn't support hard links.

I want Acronis to think along these lines, not to keep giving us old-fashioned technology with a shiny new UI every year.