Help with setting up backup plan

I feel your pain.  I see you have posted to my other "Major Flaw" thread.  Since you are removing the drives that have a vault on them and replacing it with another disk the vault is recreated and Acronis is confused.  Your only hope would be to create a separate vault on each disk i.e. if your external drive is drive g; then make G:\Week1 as a vault, G:\Week2 as a vault, G:\Week3 as a vault, G:\Week4 as a vault.  Each of these would be on their own disk.  Then make backups that run on the 1st Monday (FULL) through Friday (incremental).  I don't see how you would be able to do the Friday-Thursday unless your full was the 1st Friday and incrementals were for the second Sun-Thurs.  You would do the same for the 2nd week's backup plan and so on.  I have the basic 5 day full backup rotation that I am testing this with.  I have the same problem in that my cleanup task is not deleting the previous weeks backup.  I have a 5day retention setup and my archives are 7 days old when the next backup is run.  My cleanup tasks run successfully because I am not confusing Acronis with my vaults as they are the appropriate one for each backup job.  However, it still is not deleting my old archives.  Whether I run it manually or  automatically before the job.  If I open the vault and delete the archive then the next backup I get the RecreatedArchive.....tib.  WHAT A MESS.  I am chatting right now with Acronis but it doesn't look promising so far.  I will let you know if they have any great ideas of how to make their product work for us.

Thanks Shane. I appreciate the input. The plan you came up with is pretty much how I'm going to have to do it. I understand creating separate vaults for each drive, but are you running the same plan for all the vaults? In other words, you only have one backup plan running correct?

My plan is doing a full on Friday, then differentials Sat, Mon, Tues, Wed, and Thurs with a new drive going in on Friday to repeat the process.

I'll give your plan a shot. Like I said, it was working up until the deletion task wouldnt run, but hopefully that will change with the separate vaults for each drive.

I guess the recreatearchive thing will be the next major hurdle. Please keep me updated as to your findings.

Thanks again,

Chris

Chris,

I was told that an "Expert" would send me an email with the solution to my problem.  I have been waiting for this mysterious Expert to emerge with his wisdom for a month.  I have now resorted to a scheduled task that deletes all .tib files from whatever vault is connected.  This task runs 10 minutes before my backup starts.  I know this means that all my backups will be called RecreatedArchive..........tib but at least since I have created all of these vaults on different disks with meaningful folder names so will there will be no confusion about what image is on the disk.

In my situation I had to create a different backup plan for each night of the week and set the destination as the appropriate vault.  In my examples to Acronis I have just used the example of the M-F disk rotation.  In reality I have a 9 disk rotation M-TH, Fri1,Fri2,Fri3,Fri4,Fri5.  For a single server doing this I needed to create 9 vaults and 9 backup plans.  In environments where I have multiple machines backing up to a centralized server with the external USB drive attached this has been multiplied by the number of machines.  For example I have a site with 5 machines using Acronis.  Therefore I have had to create 45 Vaults and 45 backup jobs.  With the old version of Acronis I just used 1 backup job per machine and did nothing special with the backup disks like create individual vault folders.  This is a huge administrative burden now.

I wish I could downgrade but the Sector 63 issue when analyzing the disks was never solved for me.  I might just have to revisit that now that some time has passed. 

Thanks,

Shane

I agree that "This is one of the most convoluted pieces of software that I have ever used."! Below is just one problem introduced because the setup is so unnecessarily convoluted, with no attempt to give examples or clarify use in the docs.

Under True Echo, I could set one nightly Incremental Task to backup my C: Drive into a directory on my E: drive. I have a Thinkpad running XP Pro SP3. Once a week I'd use the pre-command to move the E: backup to my G: drive, and I'd save a few weeks on my G: drive. Echo then simply created a new full backup on E:

With ABR 10, on the day of the new FUll Backup, An additional run is preformed, adding a RecreatedArchive. Right now, I see no settings in the Management Console under Backup Defaults to keep just one archive.

The problem I see in moving out the Full + Incremental files once a week (as I did OK with True Echo) from my e: to my g: drive, is that BEFORE the Pre command, the mask of the files has been set to the files there at the time, e.g., with files names containing last week's date.

ABR 10 is really confusing (not just to me) in that an hour later (my schedule calls for just one run at 11 pm), an ADDITIONAL Full Backup is performd, but with a wacky prefix like RecreatedArchive ..[long number?]_presentdate..D.TIB????

I do not have room on e: for two Full Backups + Incremental files, so I have deleted the RecreatedArchive[.] files on both of our machines. (These problems occur on both.)

I think this problem and some others might be easily solved if the user could simply override the default of having the date put into the archive file names (I split my files into max length 700 MB, so I get 25-30 files). I think simply trying to use the post command on a full backup set of files (as first suggested by today's tech support, but retracted as not sure) will likely cause the Validate to fail.

The docs are not really clear on how Retention rules might help here. (Acronis tech support today -- Sat -- was not sure and they said an Advanced tech support person will call on Mon?)

I have set the Retention rules to Delete backups older than 5 days and also set an archive size limit of 38 GB which will suffice (I hope) to prevent two full backups within an hour of each other?

Since there still is no reply to this I will add new info:

Last night, with a Full backup with 09_19 in the dates (because I deleted the extra archive RecreatedArchive ..[long number?]_presentdate..D.TIB made on the moring of 09_26), Acronis did not Increment the 09_19 archive, presumably because of my new Retention Rules described above. It created a new 09_26 Archice dated the evening of 09_26 (no RecreatedArchive prefixes at all). HOWEVER, it left the full 09_19 archive. The total space int eh archive was about 50 GBytes, larger than the 38 GBytes I had set in the Retention Rules. How can I simply get ABR 10 to do what I used to do under True Echo? How? How?

Lester

Hi Shane,

Quick question: How do you schedule your backups? I mean, since you have multiple jobs and multiple vaults, how do you have each job starting?
I'm trying to do weekly backups on four drives, so I need four vaults and four backup jobs. I'm trying to figure out how to make it so that week 1 job will run when drive 1 is in the machine, week 2 job will run when drive 2 is in machine, etc, etc.
None of the options in scheduling seem to be really viable. Just wondering how Acronis can tell which jobs to start on which week, etc.
Hope this makes sense.

Thanks,

Chris

I'm having the same problem. Retention rules do not process to delete the older backup files. Did either of you ever find a solution to this? I may just implement a batch file that deletes all TIB files prior to the backup job running.