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Start from scratch

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I use Acronis True Image 2016 and haven't used it to it's full potential. Similarly I have a number of external hard drives which I find are not synchronized correctly and want to start again from scratch. The hard drive on my PC contains images from 2018 only but my main external hard drive storage contains images from 2004 to 2018. I have 3 other external hard drives and they contain images from different time periods. How do I organise them so that they synchronize correctly and which one do I use as reference point. If for example I work on new images, they are stored on the 2nd hard drive on my main pc and I usually forget to update the images on my external hard drive to match. I already have my external hard drives renamed to specific drive letters so I can ID them.

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Nigel, it is very difficult to advise you on how to oranise your range of old backup images, especially as I suspect that these have come from multiple different computers, running different versions of Windows OS over the period of 2004 through 2018.

Another factor that will come into play here is the different naming systems that Acronis have used over that same period of time where the earlier versions allowed much more user control, so only you will know exactly which files relate to which of your computer systems etc.

Nigel, thanks for the PM with extra information.

I suspect that you have got yourself a job for a long time ahead in order to organise, identify and remove all the unwanted duplicate files.

If you are doing this work on a computer with ATI installed, then you should be able to mount your .tib files to a Windows drive letter to allow you to start the work.  Note: this is only possible if the .tib files are disk & partition type backup images - you cannot do this for files & folders type backups, for which you would need to take a different approach.

Assuming that you can mount a backup image (or else restore one to a spare drive), then there are various tools available that can search for duplicate files, or synchronisation tools that can compare the contents / files stored in two different locations.

If you are dealing with duplicate images, then the size of files involved may be an issue unless you have a large capacity drive where you can perform the organisation.

If these files are important to you, then please ensure that you protect the original files.