Acronis 2020 Differential Automatic Cleanup Loss of functionality?
In previous versions of ATI, there was the possibility of deleting automatically individual differential versions of backups older than a certain number of days.
Apparently in 2020, this is not available any longer, and differential automatic cleanup by age affects an entire backup chain rather than individual versions of a chain. In effect, differential clean up by age is now the same as incremental clean up by age.
This apparent loss is probably due to the tibx format introduction, but I didn't find any mention of it.
Can you guys confirm this? Maybe I am facing some other cleanup issue...
Thank you Steve. I will go back to incremental chains for now as the key benefit of differential for me was this ability to maintain an even trailing history of backups.
Has there been a good, clear description of what "differential" means in the .tibx universe? My impression of the old scheme was that differential backups in a "chain" were independent of each other so that removing an old one was a natural and trivial action. (Maybe I underestimate the complexity of the old scheme. I have rarely used differential backups.) With .tibx there seems to be an interdependence that I don't understand.
There have been a number of new KB documents dealing with different areas of .tibx files & usage etc but nothing specific that I have seen just for differential backup files.
There were some earlier forum topics complaining about errors when unwanted differential files were being deleted, in particular for recovery scenarios which suggested an interdependence for these version chain files.
Hello everyone,
Pat, are you sure this option was available?
Here is the userguide for Acronis True Image 2019 (before the .tibx format for any local backups):
https://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/ATI2019/index.html#…
- Delete versions older than [defined period] (available for full method only)
- Delete version chains older than [defined period] (available for incremental and differential methods only)
It was always chains for non-full backups.
Hallo Renata Gubaydullina, das Backup-Schema "Versionskette" soll etwas ähnliches können (ich habe leider niemals die 6 Monate abgewartet, um zu sehen, ob etwas gelöscht wird). Eine veringerung der Zeit auf einen Monat wäre meiner Meinung nach nützlich.
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Hello Renata Gubaydullina, the backup scheme "version chain" should be able to do something similar (unfortunately I have never waited the 6 months to see if something gets deleted). A reduction in time to one month would be useful in my opinion.
@ Renata
I am pretty sure yes, because I tested the differential clean up just prior to upgrading to 2020.
In ATI 2019 differential you can produce a set of backups with a trailing aging history.
You are right: the 2019 UI is saying "version chains" but it is misleading because it is cleaning up *versions", not *chains*. See the word document attached.
The first downside with cleaning up version chains is the lumpiness. For example if you keep only 1 chain, you have no backup history after completing a new full.
The second downside is that you have to adjust the full backups frequency to your aging and storage management goals so that you don't end up with big backup chains that take for ever to get completed before they get cleaned up.
In my mind, the ability to create a trailing history is the key advantage of differential backups over incrementals. Fewer full backups have to be created. The key reason for creating full backups becomes the growing size of the differentials: you can choose the frequency based on the amount and frequency of changes in the disk.
In older versions, the automatic or UI driven cleanup of differential versions, not chains, had some issues (for example, the recovery CD could deem a cleaned up chain corrupted), but these problems were gone with 2019.
Now with 2020, the UI ("delete version chains older than X days") is consistent with the behavior.
I would prefer that the functionality be kept and the UI corrected for differentials (delete versions older than X days)