Managing your backups with Acronis True Image Home 10

Acronis True Image Home 10 works well with Windows Vista. It has a quota management system which allows you to specify the amount of space to use and the number of files you want keep. I run a daily incremental backup from my 160GB RAID 1 array to a 120GB USB drive. The USB drive tends to get filled up quickly, however I would like to keep 2 weeks worth of backups. In order to accomplish this I need to move backup files from the USB drive to another drive on my system. Acronis has a feature which allows the executions of commands in a .bat file before or after a backup.

I used the information in a post from Steve Bisel on the Acronis forum which was very useful as a basis for what I wanted to do.

I created a week - 1 directory on my other internal drive (E:) to move the current backup files from my USB drive (J:) to. Since I only want to perform this once a week, I need to create a task which will run once a week and perform a full backup. Before the full backup is run I will run a .bat file with commands to move the files. Here is the .bat file I ended up with:

@echo off
Rem Batch file for weekly Backup Mgt

Rem Delete the previous weeks backup

del /q "E:\Acronis backup\Week - 1\*.*"

Rem Move current week's backup to week -1

move /Y "J:\Acronis backup\MyBackup*" "E:\Acronis backup\week - 1\"

exit

I created two scheduled tasks. The first, a weekly full backup with the above commands in a .bat file created with notepad as the pre command making sure I checked the two boxes forcing completion before the backup starts and aborting the backup if the commands fail. The full backup runs on Friday. The second, a daily incremental which you have to setup to run as a weekly and check all of the days but Friday. This avoids running a full and an incremental on Fridays.

Make sure you test you .bat file before including it in your backup.

Comments

[Brad]

We do something similar but instead on moving the file we run a second job that puts the file off site. This creates a second copy and fills the "off-site requirement".