User manual ACRONIS BACKUP RECOVERY 10 ADVANCED SERVER SBS EDITION

[. . . ] Acronis® Backup & RecoveryTM 10 Advanced Server SBS Edition User's Guide Copyright © Acronis, Inc. , 2000-2010. "Acronis" and "Acronis Secure Zone" are registered trademarks of Acronis, Inc. "Acronis Compute with Confidence", "Acronis Startup Recovery Manager", "Acronis Active Restore" and the Acronis logo are trademarks of Acronis, Inc. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. [. . . ] Set the retention period for the backups. 6. 2. 9. 4 At a glance Grandfather-Father-Son scheme Daily incremental, weekly differential, and monthly full backups Custom day for weekly and monthly backups Custom retention periods for backups of each type Description Let us suppose that we want to set up a backup plan that will regularly produce a series of daily (D), weekly (W), and monthly (M) backups. Here is a natural way to do this: the following table shows a sample two-month period for such a plan. Mo Jan 1--Jan 7 Jan 8--Jan 14 Jan 15--Jan 21 Jan 22--Jan 28 Jan 29--Feb 4 Feb 5--Feb 11 Feb 12--Feb 18 Feb 19--Feb 25 Feb 26--Mar 4 D D D D D D D D D Tu D D D D D D D D D We D D D D D D D D D Th D D D D D D D D D Fr W W W M W W W M W Sa Su - Daily backups run every workday except Friday, which is left for weekly and monthly backups. Monthly backups run every fourth Friday, and weekly backups run on all other Fridays. Monthly ("Grandfather") backups are full; Weekly ("Father") backups are differential; Daily ("Son") backups are incremental. Parameters You can set up the following parameters of a Grandfather-Father-Son (GFS) scheme. Start backup at: Specifies when to start a backup. The default value is 12:00 PM. 190 Copyright © Acronis, Inc. , 2000-2010 Back up on: Weekly/Monthly: Specifies the days on which to perform a backup. Specifies which of the days selected in the Back up on field you want to reserve for weekly and monthly backups. A monthly backup will be performed every fourth such day. Specifies how long you want the backups to be stored in the archive. A term can be set in hours, days, weeks, months, or years. For monthly backups, you can also select Keep indefinitely if you want them to be saved forever. The default values for each backup type are as follows. Daily: 7 days (recommended minimum) Weekly: 4 weeks Monthly: indefinitely The retention period for weekly backups must exceed that for daily backups; the monthly backups' retention period must be greater than the weekly backups' retention period. We recommend setting a retention period of at least one week for daily backups. Keep backups: At all times, 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 weekly or a monthly backup remain in the archive for a few days past its expected expiration date. If the schedule starts with a daily or a weekly backup, a full backup is created instead. 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. Start backup at: 11:00 PM Back up on: All days Weekly/monthly: Saturday (for example) Keep backups: Backup scheme parameters can then be set up as follows. 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. Copyright © Acronis, Inc. , 2000-2010 191 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. Start backup at: 6:00 PM Back up on: Workdays Weekly/monthly: Friday Keep backups: Backup scheme parameters can then be set up as follows. Daily: 1 week Weekly: 10 days Monthly: 6 months With this scheme, you will have a week to recover a previous version of a damaged file from a daily backup; as well as 10-day access to weekly backups. Each monthly full backup will be available for six months since the creation date. Work schedule Suppose you are a part-time financial consultant and work in a company on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On these days, you often make changes to your financial documents, statements, and update the spreadsheets etc. [. . . ] 347) or when using Acronis Active Restore (p. 347), because these features are primarily meant for instant data recovery on the same machine. Universal Restore is not available when recovering Linux. Unmanaged vault Any vault (p. 356). V Validation An operation that checks the possibility of data recovery from a backup (p. [. . . ]