User's Manual

With this in mind, let's consider a more complex backup strategy scenario requested by a real Acronis

True Image Home 2010 Netbook Edition user. You want to schedule backups as follows: on the first

day a full backup, followed by 6 incremental (or differential) backups, than a new full backup. You

want to keep 3 weeks worth of backups but not more. At the beginning of the fourth week, once the

full backup has been created, you would like the program to automatically delete the full backup

from the first week and all 6 linked incremental backups. This is not possible to implement with one

backup task, but three backup tasks will provide the desired result.

Suppose you plan to make backups every night at 10:00 PM.

a) When you come to the Scheduling step while configuring the first backup task, select the Weekly

option, set "Run the task every 3 weeks", then select all seven days of week and set 10:00 PM as the

start time. Leave the current date as the "Start date".

b) At the Backup method step choose the Incremental method, select the "Create a new full backup

after" checkbox and set "6" in the number of backups field. In addition, select the Delete previous

backup archive check box, then finish configuring the backup task.

c) Create the second backup task with the same settings as the first one. To do this, right-click on the

just created task on the Tasks and Log screen and choose Clone in the pop-up menu. Rename the

cloned task as you wish and then choose Edit on the toolbar or in the pop-up menu.

When creating the second task, make sure that the target archive name differs from the archive name assigned

in the first task, because if the names are identical the backups created by the second task will overwrite those

created by the first one.

In addition, set the date a week later than the current one as the "Start date".

d) Similarly create the third backup task with the same settings except the backup archive name. The

start date should be two weeks later.

When all three tasks run, they will implement exactly the backup scenario you want.

This approach can be used for implementing any similar backup strategy. For instance, if you want to

keep backup chains for two weeks, create two scheduled tasks each running every 2 weeks. To keep

such backup chains for four weeks, it is necessary to create four tasks each running every 4 weeks,

etc.

If you turn off the computer for several days, for instance, when leaving home for the weekend or on vacation,

some incremental backups will not run and this sequence will be broken. In such case you will have to delete old

backup archives and start the scenario once more.