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Cleaning up backup versions

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I am using Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office edition to perform differential backups of the primary disk on my Win10 system. The backup target is a separate internal disk on the same system. My question is how many versions of differential backup I should maintain, or said another way, when can I delete older versions of the differential backup set.

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Brian, welcome to these public User Forums.

Unwanted differential backup files can only be deleted manually by using the Clean up versions tool option for the backup task.  Automatic cleanup cannot do this because it only works with complete backup version chains.

KB 70397: Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office: How to delete old backups

The number of backups to retain has to be your decision but I would recommend creating a new Full backup after any significant Windows change, i.e. new build or upgrade to Windows 11 etc.

Steve;

thanks for the explanation.  To be clear, if my goal is to be able to restore to any point in time t-14 (which t = today and 14 being the past 14 days), then I would be able to do so as long I have a FULL backup and a the most recent 14 days of differential backups. All older "differential" backups could be deleted using the "Clean up backup versions" capability. Is my understanding correct?
NOTE: I am currently performing daily differential backups.

Brian, you should be fine provided that you only ever use the Acronis methods for deleting unwanted backup files, i.e. Clean up versions or automatic cleanup option.  This is because there are now metadata linkages between these backup files that get corrupted if files are deleted using such as Explorer.

The number of backup files is only limited by your storage drive capacity.

The disadvantage of using differential backups is that these increase in size with each backup as they always capture all changes to source data from when the initial Full backup was made.

Incremental backups are typically smaller because they only capture changes since the previous backup be that Full or Incremental.

Incremental backups are stored / automatically consolidated into the same file as the initial Full backup for the version chain versus Differential being in separate files.