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Consolidate old backup chains to eliminate duplication

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I have a large number of old backup chains, consisting of a full backup plus 6 incremental backups, going back more than a year. There is one backup per day. These many chains take up a lot of space on my external disk and I would like to consolodate them, since the full backups contain a lort of diplicate identical files that do not change over time. Is there an EASY way to do that?

Hellmut

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There is no consolidation option for different backups chains in Acronis.  The best you can do is to delete the inrementals to free up space and then immediately validate the backup job so that the database is updated.  You will have to click through the prompts for every missing incremental identifeid to tell it to ignore the missing file (and upate the database).  Going this route, you'd only be left with the fulls of each of those backups though, so would lose the recovery points between them - you'd lose that with consolidation as well though.  Unfortunately, you'd still probably also have a good amount of data used on the disk since the fulls are the largest backup type.  

What's your retention requiremnet, do you need to be able to go back an entire year?  If not, consider setting up an automated cleanup task (number of versions to keep. With your backup scheme, 4 would be one month, 8 would be 2 months, 12 would be 3 months and 16 months would be 4 months (approximately).   Do you have a retention need to go back more than quarterly, especially if you have multiple fulls during that time frame?

One thing I wish ATI offered is the ability to do a full base followed by multiple chains of one differential + X incrementals. Such a scheme is common in some other platforms and would eliminate the duplication in the base backups without ever having the chain too long. I think this was possible in "Acronis Backup and Restore" but doesn't seem to be supported in the home product.

I'd second that - it's the grandfather, father, son scheme.  I've requested it through feedback in the app and through the MVP channels as well.  Please submit feedback with your suggestion as well - would definitely be a nice backup scheme to have available in Acronis as well. 

Hellmut, as Bobbo said, you need to enable automatic deletion of old backup chains. For that, click "Turn on automatic cleanup" under Backup scheme tab. In older versions this automatic cleanup option was disabled and that created unfortunate situations like you have described.

What Philip asked about, the GFS scheme, is missing in Acronis True Image, it exists in Acronis Backup 11.7, a product for business users. The next version of it, Acronis Backup 12, has an even more efficient option for backup management - a single-file backup format, when all the backups except the very first are incremental, all the backups are written into a single .tib file and the cleanup is performed at block level, removing the necessity to create full backups regularly. However, there are no plans of adding the GFS scheme and single-file backup format to Acronis True Image anytime soon.

Regards,

Slava