Multiple Full Backups
Hey Guys,
I've been meaning to ask this for a while now.... I've been using Acronis since 2011 I guess and gone through multiple upgrades, currently using 2013. I use a simple backup strategy of a full back then incremental for 20 days and then another fullback. This has been going on now for a few years and I guess you can imagine my backup share on my NAS is quite large, like 2 TB at the moment. As my NAS is limited to 6TB I'd like to consolidate these backups, so what are my options?
a) Delete backups as I might never need them? But I really do need to go through the documents folder and archive stuff - when formatting I rarely recover documents and pictures unless needed
b) ?
My idea was to mount the first full backup to a drive, backup the drive to a new folder.... mount the next full backup and create an incremental :) Would this work? There has to be a lot of files that don't change within 20 days, large ones
The full backups are organised into year and computer, i.e. when I formatted or changed PC I started a new chain etc... So for each fullbackup chain I'd like to make a full backup then incremental's, is this possible or feasible?
Cheers
Ian
P.S
I'm a hoarder and hate deleting stuff :)
Typical size of a backup is around 50-70GB I would suppose, so around 30 FULL backups :) And like I mentioned, in various daisy chains of backup sets, I rarely keep the same backup chain when I reinstall or update hardware.
I only backup the C drive which at the moment is a 250GB SSD, the other 6 or so TB I don't backup.... :(
I guess it would be a decision of what to keep, but yeah, I'd love a feature to create an incremental backup from looking at 2 full backups :)
I only backup the C drive which at the moment is a 250GB SSD, the other 6 or so TB I don't backup.... :(
You should check in Windows Disk Management to see if there are other partitions, even hidden partitions, that are important. We often see users here in the forums who find after restoring a backup that it's not bootable, because they've neglected to backup a key partition. In Windows 7 and 8, often the C: partition is not the boot partition, so some other partition(s) is(are) required to created a simple restoration to a bootable system.
A full disk mode backup remains the simplest, safest method to ensure easy, successful restorations such as to a fresh drive following drive failure. If you need to exclude some stuff to reduce size, as I often do by excluding music files, that's no problem, but you want the full drive/partition geometry included.