Acronis True Image 2015 - User Guide - Manual (Page 30)

30 Copyright © Acronis International GmbH, 2002-2014
How it works
Once you start Acronis Nonstop Backup, the program will perform an initial full backup of the data
selected for protection. Acronis Nonstop Backup will then save changes in the protected files
(including open ones) every five minutes, so that you will be able to recover your system to an exact
point in time.
Usually the different states of the protected data will be backed up at 5-minute intervals for 24
hours.
The older backups will be consolidated in such a way that Acronis True Image 2015 will keep daily
backups for the last 30 days and weekly backups until all Nonstop Backup data destination space is
used.
Note, that if Acronis Nonstop Backup protects a non-system partition and no changes have occurred
for 5 minutes since the last backup, the next scheduled backup will be skipped. Acronis Nonstop
Backup will wait for a significant data change and will create a new incremental backup only when
such change has been detected. In those cases, the actual time interval will exceed 5 minutes. In
addition, if, for instance, you are working in Word and do not use the "Save" operation for an hour,
changes in the Word document will not be backed up every five minutes, because Acronis True
Image 2015 checks file changes on the disk and not in the memory.
The consolidation will be performed every day between midnight and 01:00 AM. The first
consolidation will take place after the Nonstop Backup has been working for at least 24 hours. For
example, you have turned on the Nonstop Backup at 10:00 AM on July 12. In this case the first
consolidation will be performed between 00:00 and 01:00 AM on July 14. Then the program will
consolidate the data every day at the same time. If your computer is turned off between 00:00 and
01:00 AM, the consolidation will start when you turn the computer on. If you turn off Nonstop
Backup for some time, the consolidation will start after you turn it on again.
You may think that at these backup rates the storage will fill in no time. Do not worry as Acronis True
Image 2015 will back up only so called "deltas". This means that only differences between old and
new versions will be backed up and not whole changed files. For example, if you use Microsoft
Outlook or Windows Mail, your pst file may be very large. Furthermore, it changes with each
received or sent E-mail message. Backing up the entire pst file after each change would be an
unacceptable waste of your storage space, so Acronis True Image 2015 backs up only its changed
parts in addition to the initially backed up file.
3.6.1 Acronis Nonstop Backup data storage
Acronis Nonstop Backup data storage can be created on local hard disk drives (both internal and
external).
In many cases an external hard disk will be the best choice for Nonstop Backup data storage. You can
use an external disk with any of the following interfaces: USB (including USB 3.0), eSATA, FireWire,
and SCSI.
You can also use an NAS as the storage, but with one limitation - it must accessible with the SMB
protocol. It does not matter whether an NAS share you want to use for the storage is mapped as a
local disk or not. If the share requires login, you will need to provide the correct user name and
password. For more information see Authentication settings (p. 29). Acronis True Image 2015
remembers the credentials and the subsequent connections to the share do not require login.