Backup Spanning / Using Multiple USB HD
I am using 2012 on one machine and 2013 on another so this applies to multiple versions.
I would like to backup across (or use) multiple USB3 drives. I have a 3TB model but it filled up pretty quickly with incrementals.
I could not see an obvious setting for this ability. Does ATI support this?
Zoltan,
Perhaps I am mis-reading your question.
You can create a backup task for each computer and the backup task for each computer can point the storage to the 3TB disk. Each computer should have its own storage folder on the 3TB disk.
In storing the backup files, each backup must be self contained in one folder. For a specific task, all files associated with that backup must be on the same disk and inside the same folder.
Look at link #2 below and read all the text about the figure 11-Inc.
This example uses automatic cleanup and keeps only a user set limit of backup chains (store no more than x recent version chains).
You could use this example (adjust the 6 and 4 example to fit your needs) amd TrueImage would do its own deletion and cleanup keeping only a specific number of backup files. which wold help in the managment of your 3tb space limits.
Sorry to confuse. I mentioned the 2-machines to indicate differing versions of ATI.
This backup is for 1-machine. I have numerous internal drives of >1TB - I do lots of high-res photography and videos.
The initial full backup is 2.14TB so I can't possibly put more than 1-FULL backup on the 3TB drive (or even a 4TB), thus the need for incremental and drive spanning since external drives are fairly cheap.
The incrementals vary in size, obviously, but the largest was 180GB (new content for 2-video sessions of a 2+ hour play at 4GB/12-minutes)
The initial full backup is 2.14TB
How much in-use disk space is being backed up? (Not total disk size, just the amount of used disk space.)
Not sure I understand your question. If the initial, full backup is 2.14TB, that would be the "amount of used disk space" +/- for compression. This is not the "total disk size" or capacity - that would be 4TB (for now)
No, you said the backup is 2.14 TB. So, the .tib archive is 2.14 TB.
But, what is the amount of disk space used on the drive you're backing up? (The amount of disk space in use on that 4 TB drive.)
Thats kinda what I said. Total size of .tib would be all used space (minus things like swap/hibernate) and compression. Images and video don't compress much so I use either the lowest or no compression.
I have 1-2TB and 2-1TB drives - Windows is currently reporting around 2.6TB TOTAL used (moved some stuff to external archives/USB drives to free up space before I added 3rd drive).
Not what you said at all.
I wanted to ascertain if a 2.14 TB archive was a reasonable size compared to what you are backing up. Now that you have finally given me the figure I kept requesting (2.6 TB) I can see that it's relatively in line.
You could reduce the size of the backup by choosing a higher compression level. I always select maximum compression to reduce the size of backups. Typically that might result in archives about 60% the size of the original data, but that figure varies considerably based on the nature of what you're backing up.
I did not understand what you were getting at. I was pretty sure the .tib file was properly correlated to actual space used. As I mentioned, video/images don't compress well and ATI doesn't do 64-bit and I don't think it is multi-threaded to make use of the quad-core processor. I tried compression at highest setting, once. It simply increased the backup time by a few hours and the size reduction/compression-ratio wasn't worth the extra processing time. It takes long enough to do a full backup, even to USB3 devices (yes, I have a USB3 card).
Back to my original question about spanning output devices or at least indicating multiple devices and letting it continue the backup on the "next device in the list" if it fills the first one. I am guessing this functionality isn't available in ATI........
ATI can be set to span a backup to multiple CD or DVD disks. I'm not aware that it could do so to multiple HD. It's probably something that could be programmed in by the developers, but may never have been considered. It's only relatively recently that users have begun having such large disks, so it's likely that no one has asked for that feature.
Another option would be to exclude large, infrequently changed and relatively uncompressible files from the .tib backups.
For example, on my regular full disk backups I exclude music files: .flac; .mp3; etc. I backup the music files with Robocopy, which creates file-based backups rather than compressed archives. I created a batch file that runs Robocopy, comparing my music files with the current mirrored backup and then backing up only those new or changed, and deleted any that I deleted from the source. Robocopy is multi-threaded, and I specify the use of 16 threads, so it's quite fast especially on USB 3.0.