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Making copies of backup media for on/off-site

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I would like to be able to have at least one copy of recent backup media to take offsite. My current scheme is to start a new YYYYMM folder on an external USB HDD and do incremental backups to this folder every few days. I may accumulate 10-20 of these YYYYMM folders on the physical media.

For security, I'd like to have at least one other copy of this media that I can keep offsite and refreshed every week or two as needed. The refresh should also be able to be done by rotating the off-site with the on-site as needed.

It seems that I have 2 or 3 options. I'm looking for opinions on best practices and potential gotchas.

  1. Use the "Backup reserve copy" option to simultaneously write the backup to two media. Two USB ports probably best if they are on different hubs. This would mean that both media would need to be available/online at the same time.
  2. Physically clone the on-site media to the off-site one when convenient. This would copy more data each time since it would copy all of the YYYYMM folders even if there were no changes to the older ones.
  3. Alternate backups to each of the external media via separate TrueImage jobs. I'll need to think about coordinating the availability of media and making sure I don't goof up the job with the wrong media.

Thanks for any thoughts you may have!

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Roger, welcome to these public User Forums.

It seems that I have 2 or 3 options. I'm looking for opinions on best practices and potential gotchas.

  1. Use the "Backup reserve copy" option to simultaneously write the backup to two media. Two USB ports probably best if they are on different hubs. This would mean that both media would need to be available/online at the same time.
  2. Physically clone the on-site media to the off-site one when convenient. This would copy more data each time since it would copy all of the YYYYMM folders even if there were no changes to the older ones.
  3. Alternate backups to each of the external media via separate TrueImage jobs. I'll need to think about coordinating the availability of media and making sure I don't goof up the job with the wrong media.

The Backup reserve copy does not get created simultaneously with your main backup files - it is a further backup immediately following it plus is always a full backup, with no incremental or differential files.

Doing a physical clone could work but would result in all the data on the source drive being copied every time it is performed, rather than just the changes since the last copy.  Any files held on the target drive that were not on the source would also be lost when cloning.

Option 3 is viable provided that you maintain separate backup tasks per backup drive, so will require some management to ensure the second drive is brought from off-site when it is time for the swap to occur.

ATI 2020 (due to be announced today) has introduced the concept of a replica copy for any local backup tasks but currently this can only be stored in the Acronis Cloud.  Feedback during the recent beta testing for 2020 shows users would like for this to be available to local and network drives.

The further option that could be employed here would be to use such as the integrated Windows RoboCopy tool to synchronise the files between your source and target drives.  See forum topic here where this was recently suggested to another user albeit for a different reason but which includes a quick example of the syntax for using RoboCopy.

One note of caution. From ATI 2018 onwards, Acronis Active Protection (AAP) will prevent copying, moving, deleting of any .tib backup files by default, so would need to be turned off temporarily when doing the above.