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Second Backup, backing up a Backup

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I complete a full backup every day, but very aware that its the only backup I have. My current backup is separated into different segments, photos, music and documents. This means I break it into bite size chunks, and can spread my backup over the night.

As a belt and braces strategy I am going to keep a second copy on another disc drive, but Im not sure the best way to do it.

Should I simply do a full backup of the first disk, or run a second backup to the second disk. I think keepig it small is the best strategy, so running a second backup would be my preference. Its a pity you cant run a backup twice from the same operation, along the lines of doing a weekly backup

Would do others do? Youre comments/advice would be appreciated

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Christopher, the best practice recommendation would be to go for 3 generations of backups, i.e. Grandfather, Father, Son, and where these are stored in different locations with at least one backup being held offline or off-site.

In terms of a practical approach, all ATI versions allow for the creation of a 'Reserve Copy' for a backup task, where this can be on a different drive to the main backup files.  The downside to using the reserve copy process is that this is effectively an additional Full backup tagged on to the end of your main backup task, and reserve copies can only ever be full backup files, plus the automatic cleanup rules do not apply to reserve copies, so you have to manage drive space yourself.

The alternative approach is to setup additional scheduled backup tasks where these point to a second backup drive location.  This can be done by using the 'Clone settings' option for your existing tasks, where a duplicate task with the same name, but prefixed by (1) is created, so that you only need to adjust the Destination settings, plus set a new schedule for the task to run.

See Acronis Article: The Ultimate Guide to Computer Backup - which gives a more detailed write-up on backup strategies.

As far as I can see if I use clone, it would have to be a manual operation.

My backup of smaller backups is quite big and therefore quite a lengthy process, thats why I wondered if a second backup to my 2nd drive after the backup to the first drive bit be a bit quicker, albeit a lot of backups!

 

 

 

'Clone settings' is just a way of duplicating the settings of an existing backup task in the GUI, it is nothing to do with performing a Clone of a disk drive, which is a manual operation.

See the ATI 2017 User Guide: Backup operations menu - where this is described.

The only requirement for using the second backup drive with any automated method of backup is having the drive connected when the task is to run.  If you have a network drive along with an external USB drive, then these could both be available simultaneously for use in backing up.  ATI only allows one backup task to be active at any one time, so a second task would be queued behind any active task if scheduled to run after each other or before the first task had finished.

Another possible option would be to copy the backup files for the first backup to your second drive which could be done using such as the built-n RoboCopy tool in Windows, or synchronisation software etc.