Using Acronis Nonstop Backup

Acronis Nonstop Backup provides easy protection of your disks and files. It allows you to recover entire disks, individual files and their different versions.

The main purpose of Acronis Nonstop Backup is continuous protection of your data (files, folders, contacts, etc.), though you can use it to protect partitions as well. If you choose to protect an entire partition, you will be able to recover the partition as a whole using the image recovery procedure.

You cannot use Acronis Nonstop Backup for protecting data on external hard drives.

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 Home 2011 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 Home 2011 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 Home 2011 will back up only so called “deltas”. This does not mean that entire changed files will be backed up, but only differences between old and new versions. 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 backs up only its changed parts in addition to the initially backed up file.

Using Acronis Nonstop Backup