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mixed use of incremental and differential backups

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Hi there,

I'm new to Acronis True Image 2013, want to set up some backup scenarios and I'm wondering, whether I could mix full-, differential- and incremental-backups (like I do with some other backup-SW for my servers)?

Background: I want to backup my data partition (330GB!) to my NAS. I don't rely on dozens of incremental backups but don't want to work just with differential either, so I'd like to se tup something like that:

- Fullbackup once a year
- differential backup every week or month
- incremental backup (to the last differential) every day or week

Is that possible somehow?

Thanks in advance, best regards,

Jochen

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You won't be able to do that with the home product Acronis True Image Home (ATI).
In ATI, backups are tasks that are set at the onset, and once, as full, differential, or incremental (exclusive). When the first backup of the task is done, it is a full.

You would have to run separate tasks, but they would be independant of each other. You couldn't do the incremental on top of the last differential.
You could set up:
- Task1 as differential, scheduled every month, do a new full after 11 differential (you'd get your annual full)
- Task2 as incremental, scheduled every week, do a new full after 3 incrementals (you'd get a new full every month), keep only the most recent 8 chains (2 months of history, for example).

The Task2 full backups will be redundant with the Task 1 differentials.

The professional product of Acronis, ABR, allows you to have more sophisticated/layered backups strategies, but I am not sure they would accomplish what you are looking for either.

Hi Pat,

thank you for your fast response!

So I think, I'll go with a full backup twice a year and differential backups once per week.

Best regards,
Jochen

I think a more frequent full image is better than twice a year, if corruption happens due to disk failure, power failure etc, you could have orphaned differentials just when you need it.

I would recommend perhaps a full once a month with weekly differentials. I think a full image every three months would be the limit as far as limiting the effects of a corrupted archive.

Hi Colin,

I agree. But fullbackups take a very long time and the majority of the data is static. So it's important to have it available somehwere (and I have 3 copies on different external harddrives) but the amount of data that changes, is not too big. So twice/year could be ok.

Best regards,
Jochen