Choosing the Best Backup Type and Method

Welcome to these user forums.

Ultimately the choice of backup method is yours to make and we can only offer you suggestions based on our own preferences of how to handle these decisions.

I personally prefer to keep backups of my drives separate, expecially where these are physically different drives, but also for drives with partitions where the data held in the partitions may be duplicated in other places.  Keeping the backups separate allows an easier recovery without having to worry about including something from another drive or partition and managing sizes of data to be restored etc.

Incrementals forever, in my opinion, should never be a choice offered as it the highest risk of any of the backup options - just one damaged or corrupted incremental file in a chain will destroy the chain from that point forwards, i.e. if you have 100 incremental files and file #48 goes bad, then your chain is only good upto file #47 - everything else beyond that point cannot be used for recovery.

Incrementals are good for the purpose of achieving a faster backup process but the version chains should be kept reasonably short, hence the default settings offer to create a new full backup after only 5 or 6 incremental or differential backups.  This also depends on how often you are scheduling your backup task to run, as you would increase the number of incrementals if you are running a backup every hour, i.e. create a new backup every day with 23 incrementals inbetween.

If you make separate backups of your D & E drives, then by default the initial backup has to be a Full backup, after which you can decide to create incrementals or differentials.

Acronis only ever allows one backup task to run at a time - if you try to run a second task it will be queued behind the first active task and will not run until that first task has completed.

Fully agree with Steve's comments and suggestions.

My personal setup is a backup scheme of just my OS drive (which I try to keep as small as possible with just the OS, applications, and data I use most frequently and often in my user profile).  The idea behind that concept is, if/when my OS needs to be restored, I don't have to wait hours and hours for terabytes of data to be restored with it.  Instead, I can have a fully restored OS up and running in about 10 minutes.

Then, I have separate backup tasks for different types of data.  Although I have a full disk backup, I also backup my user profile as a file/folder backup in case I need to restore files/folders out of it more easily (and because I backup the profile more often than the entire system).  

Likewise, I have different main folders on larger secondary and third drives (like software, music, movies, family photos, etc).  Each of those I create its own backup for as well.  The reason being, once again, if I need to restore/recover, I can go with just the data that I need to to make the process go faster.  Or, I can change the frequency of the backups for the particular folder (for instance, by softare respository rarely changes, so I only back it up once a month, but I back up family pictures, once a week).

There's no right/wrong way as long as you're backing up as often (or not as often) as you are comfortable with. The only real suggestion, in addition to Steve's great advice, is to also maintain multiple backups and/or locations of those backups for redundancy.  If all of your backups are on a single external drive - what happens if that drive fails, breaks, or is lost/stolen?  Worse, what happens if there's a fire in the office where the computer and backups both live together?  Having some variation and redundancy will offer some different methods for restoral.  

Thanks Steve and Bobbo for the great advice.

I do multiple backups onto separate external drives, so I’m safe in that regard.

What I’m thinking now is what kind of backup method is best for drives with large amounts of data? For example I have an E drive with 3TB plus of Blu-rays backed up. In this case the only logical way I can think of is “Create only incremental versions after the initial full version”. If I was to use differential then it would only take adding a few more blu-rays after the first full backup version to end up taking ages to backup, for example, five blu-rays would be maybe 200GB. Any idea what Acronis recommends in this circumstance?

Also, what about the two full versions that are initially created before the first incremental/differential. Is this the case for all backup types? Like in my example above of my E drive, it wouldn’t make sense to make two initial full version backups. Is it possible to set Acronis True Image 2016 to only do one initial full backup?

For a disk backup of my C drive (which only has the OS and applications), if I was to use differential, what would be the purpose of using a version chain scheme compared with having only differential versions after the initial full version? Is it just to safeguard against the full version becoming corrupted? It doesn’t seem like corrupted incremental/differential/full versions would be an issue, I’ve been using a PC for a long time now and in all that time I can only remember having a few corrupted files that were no longer accessible.

Incrementals may be a good approach for your E: drive with the Blu-ray backups - I would assume that these are already highly compressed files given that the same applies to videos, music and image formats, therefore any backup is likely to be around 1:1 for compression.

An alternative approach would be to synchronise this data to another location, such as a NAS running RAID so that you have the additional protection against drive failures that RAID gives and can use any of the available synchronisation tools / programs.  Doing this in conjunction with incremental backups would be a belt & braces approach.

Yes, all backup versions are based upon an initial full backup image - the first differential and incremental image created would be identical as both store only the changes made since the full backup - but after that they diverge - the next incremental is the changes since the prior incremental backup whereas the next differential is again all changes since the full backup, so incrementals tend to be smaller depending on the degree of change, whereas differentials can increase significantly and sometimes even be larger than the initial full if an OS upgrade such as the Windows 10 Anniversary Upgrade is captured!

Acronis works on version chains for the purpose of automatic cleanup rules - this allows you to define how large the version chain is, how long to keep the chain and how many such chains to keep.  If you go with a differential only after the initial full, then you still have a single version chain but without the ability to automatically clean up old differentials.

I agree that disk drives tend to be more reliable these days and the risk of damage or corruption is low, but a single bad sector which holds data from an incremental backup file could wreak havoc on the whole version chain this is a part of.

SSD's offer greater protection from physical issues such as head failures, motor drive issues etc but have the downside of not failing gracefully - reports that I have read show that SSD's tend to fall off the cliff when they suffer an issue and only the manufacturer can recover data from a failed SSD in that case.  

The far greater risk is that of accident, power surge, fire or probably worse that from malware, ransomware and encryption viruses etc.

Does Acronis do two initial full version backups regardless of the backup source and scheme selected? So far I have only created disc/partition backups and Acronis always initially creates two full backups. What happens if I creat a disc/partition backup of my E drive with all the blu-rays on it (folder rips non compressed) using the “Create only incremental versions after the initial full version” setting, is Acronis going to also create two initial full versions? What about if I create a files/folder backup instead using the same “Create only incremental versions after the initial full version” setting, will Acronis still create two initial full version backups? Is there a way to make Acronis only do one initial full version?

There should only be the one initial full backup file providing that you have not modified the backup task or set a maximum backup file size or encountered an error condition.

I would not recommend using the option to 'Create only incremental versions after the initial full version' as this carries the most risk of all the backup schemes as you must have each & every incremental backup file in the version chain starting with the initial full backup file.  If any incremental file becomes corrupted or damaged etc then the backup version chain is broken at that point and any later incremental files are rendered useless.

Please download and use the Log File Viewer app (link in my signature below) and use this to check the Service log files for any error messages that may show why you are seeing more than one initial full backup file.

Are you sure there should only be the one initial full backup file? I've only tested a disc backup with various schemes but in all cases Acronis has made two initial full backups before doing the first incremental/differential. It even mentions it in the user manual, see page 50, although I am not sure if it is the setting itself that activates the two initial full backup versions.

The first backup version option

Often the first version of any backup is one of the most valuable versions. This is true because it stores the initial data state (for example, your system partition with recently installed Windows) or some other stable data state (for example, data after a successful virus check).

Do not delete the first version of the backup - Select this check box to keep the initial data state. The program will create two initial full backup versions. The first version will be excluded from the automatic cleanup, and will be stored until you delete it manually.

If you select incremental or differential method, the first backup chain will start from the second full backup version. And only the third version of the backup will be incremental or differential one.

Yes, if you selected the option to retain the original, then you will have 2 full backups right off the bat - the original full (which is completely independent of anythign else from that point forward,  then a second full will get created and incrementals will be tied to to that one.  

I don't think very many people use this (at least not talked about much in the forums) because you can always copy and paste a full backup somewhere else (a spare hard drive you store in a drawer offline for safety/redundancy) and use it any time you want down the road with the offline recovery media or by adding it back to the Acronis GUI web console. 

I also would not bank on a single full and incrementals for life.  1) after a few months, do you really want to revert that far back and manually patch MS and all of your apps to the current state again - that's time consuming.  2) the reason Steve points out about incrementals depending on every one that comes before them.  AFter a period of time (that you're comfortable with), making a new full makes more sense to me.  Ultimately, that's completley your choice, but it's risky to keep increasing the incremental count and adding more and more time between your full and your most recent incrementals 

From my experiences, a "normal" IT backup plan for an easy going shop would typically be 1 full followed by 6 daily incrementals to cover a week and then repeat (retaining as many of those weekly backups as you're retention policy requires or as much space as you can dedicate to maintaining).  A more concerned IT shop might do multiple incrementals a day, plus 1 differential each day for a week.  You just have to think how much time are you willing to revert back to in case an incremental let's you down and how far back in time you're willing to go back in case you have no other choice, but to use a full backup. 

"I've only tested a disc backup with various schemes but in all cases Acronis has made two initial full backups before doing the first incremental/differential".

Sorry, my above statement is not true, I just tested Incremental scheme from the backup scheme dropdown menu and Acronis did not create two initial full versions.

But Acronis does create two initial full versions when Version chain scheme is selected. This is what it says about it in the user guide:

"At first the program creates the 1st full backup version. The version will be kept until you delete it manually. After that, according to the specified schedule (or when you run backup manually) the program creates: 1 full and 5 differential backup versions, then again 1 full and 5 differential backup versions and so on."