Backing Up Dynamic Volumes (Windows) - ACRONIS Backup & Recovery 10 Server for Windows User Manual

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Retain the backup until all dependent backups become subject to deletion
The outdated backup will be kept until all backups that depend on it also become outdated. Then
all the chain will be deleted at once during the regular cleanup. This mode helps to avoid the
potentially time-consuming consolidation but requires extra space for storing backups whose
deletion is postponed. The archive size and/or the backup age can exceed the values you specify.
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Consolidate the backup
The program will consolidate the backup that is subject to deletion with the next dependent
backup. For example, the retention rules require to delete a full backup but retain the next
incremental one. The backups will be combined into a single full backup which will be dated the
incremental backup date. When an incremental or differential backup from the middle of the
chain is deleted, the resulting backup type will be incremental.
This mode ensures that after each cleanup the archive size and the backups' age are within the
bounds you specify. The consolidation, however, may take a lot of time and system resources.
And you still need some extra space in the vault for temporary files created during consolidation.
What you need to know about consolidation
Please be aware that consolidation is just a method of deletion but not an alternative to deletion.
The resulting backup will not contain data that was present in the deleted backup and was absent
from the retained incremental or differential backup.
Backups resulting from consolidation always have maximum compression. This means that all
backups in an archive may acquire the maximum compression as a result of repeated cleanup
with consolidation.
Best practices
Maintain the balance between the storage device capacity, the restrictive parameters you set and the
cleanup frequency. The retention rules logic assumes that the storage device capacity is much more
than the average backup size and the maximum archive size does not come close to the physical
storage capacity, but leaves a reasonable reserve. Due to this, exceeding the archive size that may
occur between the cleanup task runs will not be critical for the business process. The rarer the
cleanup runs, the more space you need to store backups that outlive their lifetime.
The Vaults (p. 80) page provides you with information about free space available in each vault. Check
this page from time to time. If the free space (which in fact is the storage device free space)
approaches zero, you might need to toughen the restrictions for some or all archives residing in this
vault.

2.8. Backing up dynamic volumes (Windows)

This section explains in brief how to back up and recover dynamic volumes (p. 216) using Acronis
Backup & Recovery 10. Basic disks that use the GUID Partition Table (GPT) are also discussed.
Dynamic volume is a volume located on dynamic disks (p. 215), or more exactly, on a disk group (p.
214). Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 supports the following dynamic volume types/RAID levels:
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simple/spanned
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striped (RAID 0)
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mirrored (RAID 1)
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a mirror of stripes (RAID 0+1)
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RAID 5.
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