How to control Acronis.
I have just started to use Acronis TI 13. So far I've not been able to find settings that would allow me to control what Acronis does and does not do. For example, I suddenly find my original clean Windows backups from 2 years ago have disappeared along with multiple other more recent Acronis backups. I did not want this to happen and I have not found a setting as to how to stop this. Reading the documentation about the various backups did not help me.
I have read this entry but it doesn't indicate how to solve my problem.
41432: Why did Acronis True Image Home 2013 delete all of my backups?
What I would like to do is to control Acronis to do only what I ask it to do. I must be missing or misunderstanding some hidden settings.
I'll greatly appreciate advice.
Thank you. I appreciate your response.
This is a new installation of Acronis 2013. I have not used Acronis for probably 10 years but it worked well several computers ago. I've not to my knowledge created any tasks. I just hit a few buttons to create the backup and did the same for the restorations. I renamed the earlier ones “01Mybackups” etc. and I thought I had control until they suddenly began to disappear. They were stored in a new partition on a new secondary hard drive as well as an external USB hard drive. I have not removed any backups manually from within the program although I did extract a documents folder.
Several days ago I noticed some backup folders were empty in Windows Explorer and I'm sure I deleted several of these empty folders from Windows Explorer. I've been moving around a lot of things because the "click of death" on my storage secondary drive required a new internal secondary drive and I had software problems on the primary drive of Windows 7. Then yesterday I did watch the backups sequentially disappear from within the Acronis program and now several backups (I'm not sure which is which but I would imagine the same ones that disappeared within the program) have disappeared from Windows Explorer.
If there is no setting with which for me to control Acronis (so far it seems to be controlling me) perhaps there are some tricks that would work like moving or renaming each backup whenever or placing it in separate partitions. I'm concerned that if I opened up Acronis again it might suddenly start deleting whatever I had preserved.
Is it a problem within the program or is it my problem in expecting it to do what I want it to do which is to create a backup when I want it to and restore it when I need to?
Garrison,
You cannot rename older back ups and count on the program to manage version chains correctly. This is by design, since management occurs using a specific naming convention and database entries which are automatically populated as tasks & operations are run and completed.
Your previous back ups should not be stored in a common folder that the program currently uses as a back up destination. There is, as you know a difference between back ups which do not appear in the program's interface view, and those that are in fact missing (deleted) from a folder. I get the impression you have both going on as you said you had done some house cleaning, and had some other hardware issues.
I'd also recommend looking at the retention rules for the tasks you have created. Your retention settings will vary based on your back up scheme. How often you back up.. create fulls, differentials and/or incrementals, and how many back ups sets you want to retain before deletion.
I normally keep 3 full sets, and have the software delete the oldest set after a new complete 4th set is created. While you are becoming familiar which retention rules, you might want to move or make copies of those archives in the event your rules delete something you had intended to keep.
In my experience, the program can be trusted to to make and retain back ups for the period you specify, and delete appropriately based on quota or schedule.