Setup to Rotate Between Two Removable Hard Drives?
I am new to Acronis True Image, and was not able to find a straightforward answer to my question in the help.
I have set up an incremental backup of all my three desktop system partitions to a removable SATA drive. This has worked great. It did a full backup and then incremental backups every night as scheduled.
Now, I want to pull this drive (to move offsite) and pop in a second clean drive and have acronis simply do a new full backup and then nightly incremental backups. Every week or so, I plan to swap these two drives. Ideally, whenever I do this I want to wipe the drive and start over with a full/incremental sequence for a week or two.
I am OK with manually quick formatting the replacement drive every time I swap. Do I have to do anything special to get True Image to redo the full backup?
Any advice on how to best set this up is appreciated.
I have a variation on this thread.
I have three computers.
- A desktop PC with win 7
- A laptop with in 7 and
- A server running Windows Home server 2011.
I currently run Acronis 2014 backup all three to a dedicated high capacity hard drive on the server, using separate directories for each machine. so far, so good as this works. I use a shared name to access the drive from the remote machines. But....
This hard drive is installed in a removable device (slot) on the server. I have three drives and two slots for mounting them. I want to set up a reliable rotating backup protocol so I can always have one drive off site for serious disaster recovery, one active drive for backups and one drive ready to go when the previous one gets full. so far, I've had some success using identical directory structures on all drive and I always mount the drive with the same drive letter. Windows seems to manage the shares seamlessly in this case but I do need to reboot the server (I do it that way, I have tried a hot swap). But Acronis is getting confused about what is and is not available.
Can someone suggest a best practice for this scenario.
Charles,
Based on the tracking procedures of True Image and its Database tracking, what you want to do is not possible(in my belief) ---as you have outlined.
1. When a backup task is created, the target disk is registered into the database as a specific disk with a specific format serial number. When a backup is to be created, the program goes looking for that disk ID, and when it does not find it (a different disk has been inserted), it errors out.
2. You can achieve what you want to do with a few extra steps and a few differences.
Create a new backup task for each specific disk. Set the schedule initially to "do not schedule" on both. Whatever disk letter you assign to the external is ok as long as no changes made after the task creation. Many of us prefer to use alphabet drive letters such as x or y or x so the insertion of a flash drive or camera, etc does not change the drive letter assigned to the external disk. Do be certain that each external disk has its own unique volume name. I like to include the drive letter as part of the volume name, such as
WD640_Y
but just an example.
3. The scheduler can be turned be turned on or off from within each task WITHOUT USING THE "EDIT SETTING" OPTION. Here is an illustration of how.
The turning off is a simple one step change.
The turning on is a multi-step change as the desired schedule must be freshly created each time the task is changed from off to on.
http://forum.acronis.com/system/files/turn-off-scheduler.jpg
http://forum.acronis.com/system/files/turn-on-or-change-scheduler.jpg
4. When disk 1 is to be used:
a. For prior disk and task, Turn off the scheduler on the old task just completed.
b. Attach disk 1. From inside Task 1, and turn SCHEDULER ON and reset the schedule settings for task1/disk 1.
5. When disk 2 is to be used:
a. Turn off the scheduler on the old task just completed involving disk 1
b. Attach disk 2. From inside task 2, and turn SCHEDULER ON and reset the schedule settings for task1/disk 2.
6. Repeat this procedure for each switch of disk.
7. You might want to tie a reminder to make sure the correct disk is to be attached based on the schedule task currently enabled. This would catch if you have the wrong disk attached.
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/42887
8. If you need assistance on setting up the task to prevent "disk full" messages, set up your backup scheme as per signature link 2 below, illustrations 11-Inc (if using full plus Inc); or 11-Diff (if using Full plus Dif); or 11-Full (if using only Full). Change the examples of 6 and 4 to meet your needs. The scheme is set to keep a certain number of backup chains based on number retained. This option has worked well for me. Do be sure and read all the text comments associated with the pictures.
9. My recommendations is always to avoid changing a backup task configuration as the results will usually be not what is expected. If changes needed, cease to use the old task and start a new task with the desired changes. Also, my suggestion is that each new task point to its own empty storage folder. My preference is NOT to mix backup files from different backup tasks.
Thanks for your suggestions.
I do have some refinements / clarifications. I am not using mapped drives for the shared folder so I don't think the text about "disk ID" is pertinent. I learned long ago that mapped drive assignments are fragile AND I also do a lot of work on shared directories on my machines and clobber mappings regularly. I am using a full UNC designation such as \\myserver\AcronisBackups\zenbook. My current shared folder name is\\myserver\AcronisBackups and I append machine specific subdirectories. This is supported by Acronis and is reliable.
However, what I will do is have three sets of shared mappings, either at the share name (i.e. AcronisBackup1, AcronisBackup2.....) or a named backup subdirectory such as (AcronisBackup\Backup1, AcronisBackup\Backup2, etc.) and create the three tasks you recommend.
Perhaps I am not understanding correctly but I do want to re-emphasize that the backup will only succeed when the target disk in use is the same target disk as was connected during the task creation process. Target folder will be the target disk and folder selected as target during task creation.
I think we understand each other with the exception of "target disk". I am using the convention of a full network share with no disk drive in the target name. But I WILL be setting this up for discrete share names for each disk that I mount, each having a separate task. I think it will work as you describe.