www.aiscl.co.uk

I have a few months worth of backups that AIS has created for me. The backups of selected directories on my primary hard drive are backed up to a second hard drive. Now I want to copy these backup files to a DVD and have discovered that the backups contain my Outlook .pst data file that is nearly 1 GB in size and has been backed up many times. I would like to go into the backups and delete these zipped .pst files because they are too large for convenience and I don't need them backed up very often. However, I fear that if I delete the zipped .pst files, it may disrupt the AIS indexing and future restores will be difficult. Is there a good way to delete files from existing backups without hurting AIS indexing?

Brook

Hi Brook

Use the Manage Backup / Backup Maintenance option to remove files and folders from a backup. This option has been improved in version 1.9 of AISBackup and I recommend that you download this first.

http://www.aiscl.co.uk/downloadaisbackup.htm

Go to the file or folder you want to delete then right click / choose delete option. Files are not physically deleted unless you choose the appropriate Delete button.

Backups may also be automatically pruned, but you must decide beforehand whether the backup should be session based or generation based.

I will give two examples where 3 Sessions / Generations are retained.

Session based backups may be used to restore a PC back to a time that a backup was made, but if a file is deleted and 3 more backup sessions run after the third backup the file will not exist in the backup anymore.

Generation based backups are better used for data backups, e.g. Documents, e-mails etc. With this style of backup up to 3 versions of each file will remain on the backup even long after the file has been physically deleted from the PC. Using this style of backup the PC cannot be restored back to a previous date.

The default style of backup is Session / Retain all files. Session style backup’s may be auto pruned by using the Manage Backup / Undo Backups option. There are two choices, either remove the latest backups (from a date to the last backup) or from the first backup to a selected date. AISBackup does not remove files that were physically backed up on a particular date but removes files that only exist in the selected sessions.

If you would like to try out these options create a backup of the AISBackup Database folder and run a few backup sessions (Files always change in this folder each time a backup is run so a few sessions / generations will be created). If you would like to see the difference between generation and session style backups create a few notepad files, backup, change a few, delete one, backup etc. To quickly look at the contents of each file backed up double click the filename from the restore screen. Switch between sessions to see the affect of deleting files and re-creating the file between sessions.

Please let us know if this helps.

Barry