How many incrementals in a chain.
I am curious what is recommended as a maximum no. of incrementals in a chain. I have had some restore problems and I found the recommended method from Acronis on how to permenently kill the active protection, and wanted to test.
To test I was taking several incrementals, mounting the imaqe to see if I could play a file and if good then doing a restore. All well went well until I had 18 incrementals. The chain mounted, I was able to play the file and felt all was well. I use the Linux recovery and when I went to restore the file it simply couldn't find the chain. So that was a fail.
Any thoughts.
Pete


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Hi Ian (I hope I got your name right(
Some more detail of what I did.
I did a reinstall of 2018, and then following the faq I turned off active protection. I was retesting as I had a few restore failures,, but I hadn't used the Acronis procedure for turning off Active Protection I then set up a simple setup. 1 Full and unlimited incrementals. I build the linux recovery environment as it's faster then the Winpe's.
I then took a full and 5 incrementals. After every incremental I mounted and checked the image. After the 5tth I did a full restore with the linuxRE.
I then took 5 more incrementals and repeated the restore. Everything went fine.
I then took 8 more incrementals. the mounting the image check was fine so I attempted the restore. When I went into the RE, and navigated to the image files there was nothing there. Booted back to Windows and went into ATI. Tried the recovery from the GUI, but again no images at all.
At this point I uninstalled.
Last night I re installed and setup a full and 7 incrementals, retaining 2 chains. Am retesting with this setup.
Pete
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Hi Ian
I took your sugesstion about settting and have been beating on it with images every half hour and restores very frequently and all is well.
Thanks for the tipi
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Pete, good to hear things are working out well for you.
Ian
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I am tempted to do a month's worth....one full and 30 increments an external 4TB drive. Is this a bad idea?? I do have other backups just in case (cloud, second external backup.)
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Richard, the honest answer here is 'it depends!'.
If you are using an older version of ATI such as 2019 and earlier, or using ATI 202+ doing Files & Folders backups - all those that still use .TIB files where incrementals are stored in separate files, then the higher number of incrementals can also increase risk should a single incremental file become corrupted / damaged or lost, as the chain is broken at that point.
With ATI 2020 onwards using .TIBX files where incrementals are automatically consolidated into the initial Full file, then the risks are different but less when using larger numbers.
With the older .tib incrementals then I tended to keep the number down to around the default values but with the new .tibx incrementals, I have used higher numbers up to around 30 for some of my tasks and all has been good to date.
As with any backup scheme, having multiple backups using multiple storage locations etc is recommended for resilience and protection.
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