Backups to removable drives
Hi, I want to pick your brains about configuring ATI 2017 to backup entire disks to a removable drive.
I have a removable drive caddy which holds images of my C: (system) and D: (data) drives, on a differential backup scheme. The caddy is powered down when not in use (ransomware protection, cannot encrypt a drive that is not connected) so it is strictly an on-demand backup. I normally do this every week or two, along with daily incremental backups of my Documents and game saves to a NAS.
When a drive is nearly full I remove it and switch to another freshly formatted drive, keeping the old versions for a little while in case the system wipes out while making the first new backup. So if it all goes tits up I have another set of backups older than the current set, plus of course my recent documents.
It seems that whenever I switch the drives I have to create new backup tasks for backing up C: and D:
However ATI does not seem to be very good at reading old backup volumes from a previous task, it does not seem able to simply scan a drive for backup volumes. Recently I wanted to recover some files that were a few months old, and the only copy was on the "old" backup drive. I couldn't get ATI to scan the drive for backups, it would only search for backups related to the current tasks. In the end I had to use the USB key to launch ATI at bootup to read the drive and recover the files. It seems like as soon as you switch the drives ATI forgets everything and just gets confused.
Is this something I am doing wrong, or is ATI just pants ? Is there a better method I should adopt ?


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Thanks for the reply. I don't mind creating new tasks, but why is it that Acronis can't read backup files that aren't associated with the current task ? Previous versions of ATI could do this, as can the USB key recovery version. It seems like a bit of an oversight to me.
Merry Christmas !
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why is it that Acronis can't read backup files that aren't associated with the current task ? Previous versions of ATI could do this, as can the USB key recovery version.
Acronis can read any backup files but if you want to access these using the main ATI GUI, then you would need to use the option to 'Add existing backup' in the GUI for such files.
An alternative method is to either double-click or right-click on your .tib file in Explorer which will allow you to open & explore the file contents or mount the file (disk images) to a drive letter.
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Steve Smith wrote:why is it that Acronis can't read backup files that aren't associated with the current task ? Previous versions of ATI could do this, as can the USB key recovery version.
Acronis can read any backup files but if you want to access these using the main ATI GUI, then you would need to use the option to 'Add existing backup' in the GUI for such files.
An alternative method is to either double-click or right-click on your .tib file in Explorer which will allow you to open & explore the file contents or mount the file (disk images) to a drive letter.
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Hi Steve Smith,
thanks for your sharing, Hopefully it would be worked
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Bob Ingledow wrote:When a drive is nearly full I remove it and switch to another freshly formatted drive, keeping the old versions for a little while in case the system wipes out while making the first new backup. So if it all goes tits up I have another set of backups older than the current set, plus of course my recent documents.
It seems that whenever I switch the drives I have to create new backup tasks
Hello Bob,
thank you for sharing your use-case - I've added a reference to this topic to the existing feature request implement support of removable drives swap within a single backup plan (internal ID TI-32805). Currently such scenario is not possible, because Acronis True Image doesn't store any information about backup contents stored on previously removed drives and this information is necessary to continue the backup chain. As the result, if you change the target drive, the program will likely throw an error message alerting that the target storage specified in the backup plan is no longer available.
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