Windows 7: backup settings & deletion question

is it possible to select how long windows will run incremental backups before it does a full backup?

lately my sets have been going for 5-6 days and then it'll create another full backup. I don't need this as it's wasting space.



also, is it possible to have the backup utility delete backups that are older than X days?

I'm using Windows 7 professional 64 bit.

Hi Andrew and welcome to Seven Forums. There is no way of telling Windows to do this with an automatic backup. You can however take complete control using these shortcuts.

Incremental:

Backup - Make a "Create Incremental Backup" Shortcut

Full:

Backup - Make a "Create New Backup" Shortcut

can those be set up to run at specific times?

right now I have the default backup application set to run everyday at 9pm EST.

I've not tried it but you should be able to use Windows Task Scheduler to do that.

I guess what I could probably do is set the task scheduler to run a full backup every 2-3 weeks and then just run incremental backups everyday.

my friend is going to write me a script that'll delete folders that are older than X days, where X is replaced by a number I input.

That sounds like it should work.

I implemented both scripts mentioned above and set them up with the task scheduler. they're running as scheduled, but for some reason the incremental backup seems to be backing up a lot more than it should be.

for example, after installing the full backup script, I ran the script itself to grab a full backup of the following locations: my libraries and my user folder.

when the script ran the full backup, it was 2.36gb

I then installed the incremental script and ran it which produced a backup of 184kb.

after that, I set up the scheduler. on Sunday at 9pm it ran an incremental backup and picked up 284mb worth of data and ran again at 9pm tonight and picked up an additional 287mb of data. I'm not sure how as I haven't really done much on my pc these last few days....

I'm often surprised at how much changes also. Let it run for a while and see how it settles.

it's ran for almost 2 weeks now and it's not settling down. in fact, it's eating up space. it'll run a 2.3-2.4gb backup every 5 days or so and then run incremental, though much larger than I think they should be (ranges from 300-700mb per backup) backups.

I'm not sure why it's doing this. I've got the task scheduler set to run the full backup script every 2 weeks on a Sunday and the incremental to run every day....

I don't really know what to suggest Andrew. I personally gave up on Windows Backup some time ago.