Best practice for old-version cleanup in incremental backups?
I have a disk being backed up by ATI, which only contains the OS + software of my PC plus extremely few working documents (the documents reside on a separate disk). I want to set a daily incremental backup of this disk in the most effective way possible, and I'm thinking that the options that I had previously chosen (i.e., a full version after every 5 incremental ones, and to store no more than 10 chains) have space for improvement (contrary to what my backup location currently has). This is what the version group of my .tib files looks so far:
So, here are my questions:
- What would the best backup settings be for a daily incremental method in this case? A small number in cleanup days (e.g. 21 instead of 183) or a small number of version chains (e.g. 4 instead of 10)? Is the default 5-increments-per-chain setting ideal for a daily system backup, or could/should it be higher (e.g. 15)?
- Can I freely go and delete older .tib files in this version group and, if yes, is there some constraint or other criterium? Or is it better if I do that from within ATI — and how?
- Does it make any sense to de-schedule a current system incremental backup when it reaches a desired maximum number of version chains, and then to immediately set and schedule a new one in its place, so that I am ensuingly able to delete the former from within ATI (in its entirety) as soon as the latter is up and running smoothly for some days (or when I run out of backup-location space, whichever comes first)?
Zazula, the backup scheme you choose and the options for that scheme really depend on the size of space available on your destination backup drive, to ensure that this is capable of holding all the files that will be created.
The default options of creating a new Full backup after 5 Incremental backups is fine for the majority of users, but some may prefer to make this 'after 6' so that the Full backup would always be created on the same day of each week. Of course, you could make this 'after 13' and create a new Full once every 2 weeks etc.
You should not be manually deleting older backup version chains for an active, scheduled task - this will cause error messages to be given when the task next runs as information about all files created is stored in an Acronis Database store, so you would get 1 error pop-up for each deleted file!
The recommended method of managing your backup version chains is to use the Automatic Cleanup rules for your backup task, which will also manage the Database information too.
One key point about automatic cleanup: this works only on complete backup version chains, and any age or count settings do not apply until the next new Full backup has been successfully created.
A complete backup version chain = 1 Full backup plus all associated Incremental (or Differential) backup files that share the same backup sequence number, i.e. _b1_ is sequence #1.
Returning to the destination space consideration. You would need sufficient space for your 10 backup version chains (approximately 75GB x 10 = 750GB) plus 1 further Full backup file of say 70GB based on your file screen image. So your backup drive should be a minimum of 1TB just for this one backup task.
There is no need to de-schedule an existing task / reschedule it at a certain size - ATI will continue to increment the backup sequence as needed.
If you want to make any significant changes to a task, then use the option to 'Clone settings' and make those changes to the new cloned task, including giving it a new unique task name. Once the new task is working as expected, you can then delete the settings for the original task while leaving the files created by that task in place.
Thank you both for your valuable insights. I believe I'm now in a much better position to take full advantage of ATI, while avoiding any potential wrong moves from my part. Thank you very much indeed!