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Deleting incremental backups preceeding full backup

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I back up my data incrementally each day with a full back up every 90 incremental backups. Is it safe to delete the incremental backups preceeding the last full backup? I.e. Is each full back equivalent to starting afresh?

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Christian, it is safe to delete your incremental backups after you have created a new full backup provided you are certain that your new full backup is good and can be validated.

You may wish to take a look at some of the guides provided in the Best Practises Forum to see if there are any recommended backup schemes that will better meet your system backup and security requirements.  

Doing a full backup after 90 incremental backups might be considered to introduce some elements of risk as you need to be totally confident that every one of those 90 incremental backups can be used in a worse case scenario, as if even a single incremental backup is bad (or gets corrupted, damaged etc), then your ability to recover your system will be seriously impaired - the whole backup version chain is needed to recover, or at least the whole sequential version chain upto the desired point of recovery.  Incremental version chains cannot have any gaps caused by a failed / bad image.

Thanks for the quick reply and good advice, Steve, I will certainly investigate best practice further.

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Steve,

That is a good reminder and exactly why I opted to change to Differential backups several years ago.

Making incremental backups made the backup process quick because it only needed to copy the changed files.

But if you need to recover, you better have every single incremental available and valid... After realizing that, I switched to differential backups and have tested restores until I was totally happy.... and I am... Differentials have never let me down and I have found it much easier to manage.

Steve (yes, I am another Steve)

 

 

You can also use Auto Clean up in Options.

Since i've set that up, iIve had no needs to manually delete old backups.

Options --> Backup Scheme --> Backup Method --> Old version cleanup rules

 

I also prefer to use Differential Backups over Incremental, as it only really backups just the difference, the average backup fle sizes are smaller than Inclemental Backups

I.T. Slick Admin: Thanks for the suggestion about auto clean up - that also sounds worth investigating to save having to delete manually.

I've also decided to see how differential backup works in terms of backup speed as it does seem more reliable.

Christian,

This link can help.  Note example GH-13 within this link which illustrates an example of how to set up differential backups for automatic cleanup with the program doing the cleanup.

https://forum.acronis.com/forum/100416

GH25. Understanding differences between Incremental and Differential backups for data recovery.