Best Practice: Local Drive Replication and Continuous Incrementals

If you are running ShadowProtect with a continuous incremental backup schedule and you are utilising the free Local Drive replication feature of ImageManager, there are a few extra steps you need to keep in mind when configuring your replication job.

With a regular weekly full base and incremental chain, you can configure your replication target in ImageManager with the option "Files moved or deleted by ImageManager are deleted on the destination". This will successfully clean up the destination that you are replicating to when files from the local repository are removed and there is no further action required.

If you are running a continuous incremental schedule, aside from setting up your replication target you must also add the target folder (usually USB drive, e.g. R:\serverbackups\) to ImageManager as a managed folder. Once this folder has been added you should disable consolidation underneath "Consolidation settings" and then enable retention under the "Retention settings" menu. Retention settings should be the same as the source folder.

Configuring ImageManager in this way will ensure that the drives you are replicating to do not fill up with files that are no longer contained within the source folder.