Acronis Backup for PC - User Guide - Manual (Page 43)

43 Copyright © Acronis International GmbH, 2002-2014
Backup type Specifies the types of daily, weekly and monthly backups.

Always full - all the daily, weekly and monthly backups will always be full.

Full/Differential/Incremental - daily backups are incremental, weekly backups
are differential, and monthly backups are full.
The first backup is always full. However, this does not mean that it is a monthly
backup. It will be kept as a daily, weekly or monthly backup, depending on the
day of week it is created.
A backup is not deleted until all backups that directly depend on it become subject to deletion as well. This is
why you might see a backup, marked with the
icon, for a few days past its expected expiration date.
Examples
Each day of the past week, each week of the past month
Let us consider a GFS backup scheme that many may find useful.

Back up files every day, including weekends

Be able to recover files as of any date over the past seven days

Have access to weekly backups of the past month

Keep monthly backups indefinitely.
Backup scheme parameters can then be set up as follows.

Start backup at: 11:00 PM

Back up on: All days

Weekly/monthly: Saturday (for example)

Keep backups:

Daily: 1 week

Weekly: 1 month

Monthly: indefinitely
As a result, an archive of daily, weekly, and monthly backups will be created. Daily backups will be
available for seven days since creation. For instance, a daily backup of Sunday, January 1, will be
available through next Sunday, January 8; the first weekly backup, the one of Saturday, January 7,
will be stored on the system until February 7. Monthly backups will never be deleted.
Limited storage
If you do not want to arrange a vast amount of space to store a huge archive, you may set up a GFS
scheme so as to make your backups more short-lived, at the same time ensuring that your
information can be recovered in case of an accidental data loss.
Suppose that you need to:

Perform backups at the end of each working day

Be able to recover an accidentally deleted or inadvertently modified file if this has been
discovered relatively quickly

Have access to a weekly backup for 10 days after it was created

Keep monthly backups for half a year.
Backup scheme parameters can then be set up as follows.

Start backup at: 6:00 PM