When does ATI 2010 decide to make a new full backup
I have been backing up (disk level, not file level) to a disk on my local home network for about a week. The backup was defined as an incremental and it consisted of a full backup with 7 incrementals. Today I wanted to do a quick update to the backup but ATI decided to make another full backup. ATI shows it as a full backup and its size is big enough to be a full backup. On the Recovery tab, it shows the original full + 7 incrementas as one archive and it also shows the new full backup as another. I can explore both archives. When I look at the details of the new full backup, it has the same attributes as the original archive including being defined as an incremental archive (so I expect ATI to do an incremental backup when I next update the new full backup). By the way, I find the terminology a bit confusing since a backup can be defined to be an incremental backup and consists of a full backup plus 0 or more incremental backups. Maybe the correct terminology is an incremental archive consisting of a full backup along with incremental backups.
Why did ATI decide to do another full backup?
--Larry
PS: I have the Win7 disk defragger turned off in hopes of avoiding extra stuff being backed up.
The option to create a new full backup after xx incrementals is not checked. However, there are some other possibilities.
* Access to the remote disk somehow got flakey but has straightened out again. If ATI couldn't see the existing files at a critical time it might have decided to make a new base (full) backup. I'm not sure this is too likely. I am using a local external disk for backups now.
* I have discovered that editing an existing backup task is very touchy and it is extremely easy for the edited task to become a new backup, rather than an edited version of the old task. That may have happened.
In any case, I have figured out a whole lot more about using ATI after experimenting with it for two weeks now. I've also been reading parts of the user guide daily. I believe that now, after 2 weeks of trying, I've got an incremental backup working the way I want it to work. By the way, it took about 10 minutes to get the same point using Norton Ghost. ATI is way too complicated and touchy as far as I'm concerned. Maybe that's because it has so many more possibilities than Ghost has or maybe the user interface just isn't clear enough. It's hard to tell.
So, I'm going to forget about this particular issue unless it pops up again.
--Larry