ACRONIS Backup & Recovery 10 Advanced Server Virtual Edition User Manual page 209

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. on your laptop. To back up this data, you may want to:

Track changes to the financial statements, spreadsheets, etc. performed on Tuesdays and
Thursdays (daily incremental backup).

Have a weekly summary of file changes since last month (Friday weekly differential backup).

Have a monthly full backup of your files.
Moreover, assume that you want to retain access to all backups, including the daily ones, for at least
six months.
The following GFS scheme suits such purposes:

Start backup at: 11:30 PM

Back up on: Tuesday, Thursday, Friday
 Weekly/monthly: Friday
 Keep backups:
 Daily: 6 months
 Weekly: 6 months

Monthly: 5 years
Here, daily incremental backups will be created on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with weekly and
monthly backups performed on Fridays. Note that, in order to choose Friday in the Weekly/monthly
field, you need to first select it in the Back up on field.
Such an archive would allow you to compare your financial documents as of the first and the last day
of work, and have a five-year history of all documents, etc.
No daily backups
Consider a more exotic GFS scheme:
 Start backup at: 12:00 PM

Back up on: Friday

Weekly/monthly: Friday

Keep backups:

Daily: 1 week

Weekly: 1 month

Monthly: indefinitely
Backup is thus performed only on Fridays. This makes Friday the only choice for weekly and monthly
backups, leaving no other date for daily backups. The resulting "Grandfather-Father" archive will
hence consist only of weekly differential and monthly full backups.
Even though it is possible to use GFS to create such an archive, the Custom scheme is more flexible in
this situation.
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