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Handling Full Backups of over 5 TB with limited backup space

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My full backups are 5 TB and will get larger over time. I backup to an external 8 TB drive that has 7.2 TB available formatted. The first full backup runs fine, the following 6 differential backups fit fine too. But then I have Acronis set to create a new full backup. Of course, there is not enough space to fit the new 5 TB backup with the existing 5 TB backup already on the disk. The backups will then fail until I manually delete the existing backups.

There appears to be no way to automatically delete the first full backup until a second one is made. This is understandable from the viewpoint of wanting to be sure there is always a good backup in existence, but in my case it is causing the backups to fail when the second full backup is attempted.

I have two external 8 TB drives that I would like to alternate on a weekly basis with one offsite and one onsite. The price of larger external drives is prohibitive, as is cloud backup for this amount of data.

My question is: how does one handle full backups that are too large for two of them to fit on one external disk?

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otter, you have clearly stated the issue here that you cannot fit more than one 5TB full backup on a drive with only 7.2TB of available space, and that automatic cleanup works by not deleting anything until the next full backup has been created, i.e. catch22 situation.

My immediate question is to ask why are your backups so large?  5TB would suggest to me that you may be including more than one disk drive in your Source data selection?  If you are doing so, then I would recommend making separate backups for each individual, physical drive in your computer, thus reducing the size of your Full backup images.

My backup is of one 8 TB drive that has my Adobe Lightroom database and accompanying photos and videos on it. For Lightroom to function properly I cannot move anything off of this partition and so I am stuck with the size of the backup. 

OK, thanks for the clarification, then this leaves you with various options on how to handle this issue.

Carry on as you are today, i.e. manually delete the old backups and start over with a new set.

Purchase a new, larger backup drive that could hold a minimum of 2 full backups plus incremental files.

Switch to a different method of protecting the files on the source drive, i.e. synchronising the files to a second drive - this would need to be on another computer to use the ATI Sync feature, or else use a different sync tool.

Another option would be to create a Pre-Command that deleted the backup files from your destination drive before creating a new full backup, but if you are using ATI 2018 with AAP enabled, you would first need to disable AAP to allow the delete to be performed, then allow for error messages due to missing files when the backup runs.