Thank heavens for backups

Yep – nothing like a good clean-up of the files to undo all your careful set-up and possibly backup arrangements.

Acronis have a very stupid incremental backup system and no clean-up utility. Any file cleaning is definitely risky with that (not recommended) software.

Backups can use a LOT of space – at least 3 times the storage you are protecting as a rule of thumb. My comment was addressed to local backup (not Cloud). In this situation over time your backups may grow and eventually reach the capacity of your drives and a clean-up is required. (full backups are done every so often and you need to allow for these as well as incremental storage)

Acronis allows you to specify backup chain length, but when you are using incremental backup this does nothing to specify total backup size.

If Acronis had a decent manual backup cleaner in addition to its automatic cleaning, running out of disk space would not be an issue, and file deletion would be accompanied by relinking the backup database. When I was using Acronis 2017 it had no such utility and any manual backup cleaning was to say the least a dangerous exercise as Acronis barfs if it finds any step in the backup chain to be missing. i.e. your backup becomes unrecoverable – Acronis 2012 had no such problems, they only came in when Acronis went Cloudy.

If the size of your changes between backups is small then Acronis may be ok — mine are not.

Cloud MAY also be ok

To cut it short, I dropped Acronis in favour of Macrium.

Thanks for that Ed, – I use their differential backup scheme, [(1 x full + 2 x diff  over a three week period ) x 2] but the changes are small – a few documents/pictures, etc.

Google Photos/Drive has duplicated my picture backups, along with some important documents to One Drive, but these uploads are bandwidth hogs on a 16/1 Meg connection.

With the fibre connection I will get a 36/10 Meg which will make any Cloud based systems a lot more transparent.

I’ll have a quick look over Macrium and maybe have that too!