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Backup scheme - 1 month of inc, 1 year of monthly fulls

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I can't quite figure out how to accomplish my preferred backup scheme: 30 days minimum of recent daily incrementals and then a monthly full backup (with no incrementals) going back a max of 12 months. So for example if I'm at Dec 31 I want daily incrementals for the last 30 - 60 days then only monthly fulls for Nov, Oct, etc. etc. going back to Jan 1.

I'm currently doing daily backups, with "Create a full version after every" set to 30, and "Store no more than 6" option to auto-clean. I'd prefer setting that to 2 so I only have 2 long chains at most. But the problem is that a chain includes the full backup that started that chain, is that correct? So all previous full backups are getting zapped during cleanup along with their incrementals. What I'd prefer is to have the backup chains cleaned up but ONLY the incrementals and never delete a full backup.

Should I just do manual cleanups myself? I can dump all the incrementals I don't want and keep the monthly fulls, right? Never tried that. But I'll forget and run out of disk space... ugh.

I wonder if I should just create an additional backup job to do monthly fulls? But I'm already doing a full backup as part of my original scheme, so I'd essentially be doing a full twice a month instead of once? At least I'd get what I want, I suppose... thats just a lot of repetitive full backups of the same thing...

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Hello Eric!

1) You haven't specified which Acronis product you are using. Please do so, so this topic can be moved to the relevant forums. Looking at the options you mention this looks like True Image, which I have limited experience with. I'll try to answer regardless.

2) If I understand correctly you want to achive the following:

  • Daily backups kept for the last 30 days
  • Monthly fulls for the last 12 months
  • Achieve this in the same plan to avoid doing and having two monthly fulls, as you already have a plan that does this.

I've attached two pictures where I tried to replicate what you likely tried to configure. If I understand your problem correctly is that leaving the "Store no more than X" option at 6 leaves you with 5 more months of daily backups you don't want, whereas setting it to 2 wouldn't allow you to have 12 months of full backups.

3) Since you have a separate plan that does the monthly backups already, I'd set a daily differential without creating any full backups. It appears however that this way you can't have automatic cleanup, so you need to do this on your own.

Differential and not incremental, because with incrementals you wouldn't be able to delete older incrementals you no longer need as the newer incrementals depend on it. With differentials though you only depend on the first full backup, so you can freely delete the older backups you don't need.

4) FYI I also attached two pictures of how your requirement could be implemented in Acronis Cyber Backup

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Eric, assuming that you are using ATI 2020 as this topic has come to the forum for this version.

ATI 2020 does not play nicely if you start manually deleting backup files, especially with the new .tibx format backup files, so please do not be tempted to delete these files outside of using the Acronis tools provided for this purpose, i.e. either automatic cleanup rules, or the per task 'Clean up versions' tool.

The automatic cleanup tool only works for whole backup version chains, so does not offer an option to just delete incremental files while leaving behind the initial full backup file for the chain.

This is complicated with the new .tibx files as these use a single .tibx file for the whole incremental version chain instead of using separate _inc_ files as with earlier versions of ATI.

The recommended method of achieving you aim of having 2 months worth of daily incremental backups and monthly full backups is by having two distinct and separate backup tasks.

One backup task should be configured to create a monthly full backup with automatic cleanup set to store no more than 12 recent version chains.

The other backup task should be configured to create a daily incremental backup with a new full backup being created every 30 days.  Unfortunately, the ATI Scheduler options are not flexible enough to handle months with 28/29, 30 or 31 days, so you can only pick a number that gets near to your target.  All incremental backups have to have an initial full backup file on which they are based, so your backup storage destination needs to be able to store all the files being created.  For this backup task set automatic cleanup to store no more than 2 recent version chains.

The above will still give an element of duplication for the monthly and incremental full backup files but you could offset this by running the monthly backup in the middle of the month, i.e. on day 15, but the incremental full backup is started on day 1 for the first run.  It may slip back or forward a day or two as the schedule proceeds due to the number of days in the month!

 

Got it, thanks Steve that was the conclusion I came to as well, which you've confirmed, that's pretty much the only way. I like the 15 day offset idea, that's an interesting tweak, but like you mentioned the "drift" will eventually make the time between an automatic new version chain and a separate full monthly backup very out of sync...

Hm it's just too bad this isn't really possible without a pretty fair amount of full backup duplication, which I really don't like... but might be unavoidable I guess.

Thanks so much for your help.

I have the same requirements as the OP & came here looking for a solution...or a way to submit a feature request. Thanks to the respondents for providing clarification.

I have submitted a feature request via the feedback form in the application.

Follow up after having switched to this scheme, it is working out pretty well. I set it up like this:

  1. Backup task for daily backups, create a full version after 30 incrementals, but only keep 1 backup chain, so that I always have the last 30 days covered, but no more.
  2. Monthly backups (last day of month), backup method Full, store no more than 12. So now I have monthly backups going back for a year.

So there is some duplication in full backups, I wish I didn't need a 2nd task, and the two tasks are pretty much always "out of sync" in the timing as far as when a full backup happens, but essentially I got what I was looking for and it works great.