Acronis

So the full one is the base so to speak - can you remove some of the older incremental ones and replace it with new ones as long as you keep the full back up. It may sound silly but how can you distinguish? My last incremntal was about the size of the full, perhaps b/c as you said I had defragged or performed some action to cause it to be so big..

No, you can't delete any of them. Each is built on top of the previous ones. Don't let it get too many though or you may run into problems. What you need to do is setup two folders then do a full backup to folder1 then do incrementals. After you get 5 or 6 incrementls, do a full backup to folder2 then delete the contents of folder1. Continue with incrementals to folder2 until you get 5 or 6 then switch back to folder1, etc. etc. etc. This is one thing Acronis does not do and should. The term usually applied to this is backup sets. I use an addon to Acronis called Chain2Gen that handles the set generation and maintenance for me so my backups are fully automated. I have 4 backup sets, each of which holds a weeks worth of backups, 1 full and 6 incremental. Chain2Gen manages these sets so Acronis is always backing up to Set1. It's a push down stack where the oldest set is deleted, the others are renamed then a new Set1 is created. I backup every night at 10:30PM. I've been running like this for years with never a problem.

I admire your ability. A friend, proficient with pcs, showed me his system which sends hinself emails and has schedules like yours. Of course this was not learned overnight. My problem is to try to learn but not to work outside my capabilitteis. This information is very useful and will help me in the future for which I thank you. I find lately that even with an updated rescue disc, Acronis is not responding without pushing it. For example, even with an updated rescue disc, I go to MY Book which should contain my images that I see in "Computer" yet the images are not there. At times it says the path cannot be found but after I keep trying i find the image. I have to browse and with a lot of looking, finally the image will pop up under some weird place. I follow the prompts and have to struggle to get to the end where I feel just a click of "finish" would provide a valid image. I guess as long as I can use Windows or the disc to recover, I am lucky. I find recovery with the disc to be 1/2 the time as it takes with Windows. I have trouble distinguishing incrementals from fulls so I tend to do full images weekly. You are to be commended because you provide information for a whole lot of people who use this forum and would be stuck with out it. I do not expect you to answer this post b/c I wrote in generalities rather than specifics but if there is a red fag I'd like to hear about it.