Incremental Backups When Changing Media
I like to create full backups and 3 incrementals before creating another full, mostly to save space on my backup media. I also need to have 2 sets of backup media, one that's kept away from my PC location offsite. Every week or 2 I switch out the backup media, an external hard drive. The problem comes in the switchover, because it may try to do an incremental backup and the previous media isn't there any more. Is there any way to say that if the previous media isn't present to automatically do a full backup instead of an incremental backup so that it doesn't error out? Any ideas?
It would be better to create two backup tasks, one for each external backup drive.
I'm not sure how I'd do that, since this is a client I support and I never know exactly when they're changing the media. They'd have to get into Acronis and specify the different backup task and turn off the old one and I'm not sure they're competent enough to do that. Any other ideas?
You could create a desktop shortcut for each task, which the user could run when a particular drive is connected.
Otherwise, with a single task intended to service two backup drives with the same drive letter, you're going to encounter the situation you describe where the drive lacks backups that the database expects.
I'm not sure how the desktop shortcut would work when everything is scheduled automatically. Actually I was hoping that there might be an option to create a full new backup if the previous one wasn't accessible. That seems like it would be an easy switch to set and would resolve all of my problems.
Joel,
One problem here is that Acronis identifies the backup with a specific signature of a specific disk that was in use when the task was created. It also tracks which actual backup files are present. When the 2nd disk is inserted, that is an unknown disk to the program and the task will most likely fail or you will get a full backup regardless of what is due.
Are you getting a error how is the program notifying you of what it is expecting?
There is also available the program "Drive Notify" (link below) which can be used in conjuntion with the Pre/post command (Disk Backup options) and the purpose of this program is to adivse the user of which disk to insert for the backup and a specific disk is tied to the task and to the DriveNotify options.
My situation is similar except I use HD1 for a month (approx) then HD2 for a month and so on for a year. When HD 12 is full. I
want to format HD1 and start the process over. I don't care if Acronis can't find any previous backup.
How can I make this work?
Any suggestions greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Joel,
Did your get your issue resolved? If no, they come back to the forum and we can discuss in more detail.
J R Breisch,
Please repost your question as a new topic rather than into Joel's.
Also supply more information about the type of backups, frequency,
scheduled or non-scheduled, how many backup chains can your storage disk contain.
Any details would be helpful.