It is not recommended to use disk defragmentation if you back up to the Acronis online storage and the disks are of considerable size.

If you run disk defragmentation after creating a disk/partition backup, the succeeding incremental backup will roughly be the size of the full backup. For detailed information please see Acronis Backup Software Creates Large Incremental or Differential Backup Archives.

What is initial seeding and when is it needed

Initial Seeding is an option which helps you if your Internet connection is too slow to back up large amounts of data or the entire machines to the cloud storage. With this service you can save the first full backup locally and then send it to Acronis for upload. After uploading the initial seeding backup, only the incremental backups to that full backup are uploaded to the cloud.

Initial seeding is a paid service and you need to purchase one initial seeding license per each machine you want to seed.

Acronis accepts hard disk drives of the following interface types:

• SATA
• eSATA
• USB

The file system on the drive must be FAT32 or NTFS

(!) Please make sure you include all cables required to connect your drive to computer and power. Drives without cables and drives without standard power plugs (US or European) will not be processed. Make sure to ship a PSU if external power is required.

(!) SCSI, ATA, IDE and Ethernet drives are not accepted.

This article applies both to partners with On-premis storages and Acronis-hosted Storages in the Cloud.

You are offering an Initial Seeding (Physical Data Shipping) service to your customer. The customer successfully performs the first backup to a local location and then sends you the disk for upload with the Initial Seeding Tool.

A subsequent incremental backup fails with "Failed to create an incremental backup in backup archive 'computername.TIB'. The base full backup cannot be found."