Can I do this?
The day before I upgraded to TrueImage 2018, I instituted a daily backup of all my disks to supplement the ones that run weekly.
A few weeks ago, I'd been messing around with seemingly innocuous settings and had put myself in a state where I couldn't boot the next morning. I tried several rescue disks unsuccessfully (including Acronis) until I found one from 2013 that allowed me to get in and restore the system disk from my weekly backup. Unfortunately, that backup was five days old and I lost some important things.
I had picked up some hard drives cheap during Black Friday, so I decided now was the time to implement a daily. The plan was essentially identical to the supplied Acronis Version Chain backup scheme. Full one day, incremental the rest of the week. Do that for a month then delete the oldest chain and start over. The description lists Monthly and Daily variations but doesn't say how they are chosen.
The difference was that I didn't really need it to run Friday and Saturday, when I run my weeklies. I noticed that if I scheduled it Weekly instead of Daily, I could run it five days a week and skip two. That seemed ideal, but in practice, it seems to only create full backups. This is contrary to how Version Chains are described for either variation. I assigned it a 6TB disk exclusively, but it will fill that in less than three days running only fulls. It also takes several hours to execute.
Is it possible to schedule a backup to run only five days a week? I think it needs to be one full and four incremental, because the weekly has it's own pattern and most weeks is incremental itself. And now that I think of it more, my plan is flawed because it will set the flag on all the new files and the weekly incremental won't find anything to back up.
So what I need is a short term backup schedule to cover just one week, and a long term backup schedule that stretches to the limit of my storage, currently almost two years. I wonder how a monthly full and thirty days of incrementals could be done. Sounds like I'd be screwed if an incremental turned up corrupt.
That looks usable, but won't that then leave the long-term incrementals with nothing to pick up? I really only need them for the week between the long term backups.
My current weekly system is this...
Data disk: every Friday. Incremental with a Full after every 5. Store 12 version chains. This is kept two years. The Full backup is massive, about 6 to 8TB, and the validation takes even longer so I run the backup on a separate day from the system backup. The incrementals aren't bad, 180-250 MB.
System disk: every Saturday. Incremental with a Full after every 12. Store 3 version chains. Also kept two years although that's overkill and when everything smooths out, I'll probably cut it to six months and use the extra storage for the Data backups. This is an easy backup, 85 to 140MB for the full, 4 to 60 for the incrementals. There's not supposed to be anything on here but programs and the operating system but Windows gives me increasingly less control about where files go, so logs, documents, pictures and other things end up on the System disk first and take a while to get placed properly. If it were not for that, I probably wouldn't need anything other than three monthly Full backups.
What I need is incrementals to tide me over for the rest of the week in case there's a problem. But I don't need them beyond that week, and my storage needs would increase exponentially if I had to store Dailies for two years. What I need is an incremental since the last Full but don't set the flag on the file as having been backed up so that the weekly can get it..
Don, Backup tasks work independently, even if they are backing up the same disk(s). Data from a daily backup is not passed to long-term backup. Flags aren't set by a backup task.
Excellent. I'll have to work out why it was only creating Full backups instead of chains, but this knowledge means that I can work out the problem without affecting tasks that are already to my satisfaction. Thank you!