How to perform initial seeding?

1. Decide on the media that you will send.
2. Attach the media to the machine you are going to back up. Alternatively, you can back up to a local or network folder and then copy/move the backup to the media.
3. Start Acronis Backup & Recovery 10, click Back up and create a backup plan on this machine:
   • In Where to back up, specify Online Backup Storage.
   • In What to back up, select disks, volumes or files/folders you want to back up.
   • In Backup scheme, select Initial seeding. Specify the said media as the backup destination.
   • [Optional, but strongly recommended] Enable backup encryption in Backup options > Archive protection.
   • [Optional, but strongly recommended] Enable backup validation in Archive validation.

   The backup starts immediately after you click the final OK.

4. [Optional] If you want to add more backups to the media, repeat step 3 selecting the different data in What to back up. (Do not edit the backup plan, create a new one!)
5. [Optional] If you want to add backups from another machine, attach the media to that machine and perform the same steps.
6. Package the media along with a prepaid return shipping label and send it to Acronis by physical mail. The address is available on your account management Web page > Initial Seeding / Recovery tab > Orders in process > Initial Seeding orders > Datacenter address.
7. On the same web page, mark the order as "shipped" and track the order status.
8. Once you observe that the backup has been uploaded on the online storage, you can edit the backup plan to do incremental backups:
   • In Backup scheme, select Back up now, Back up later for manual backups or Simple for scheduled backups.
   • For Simple, specify the schedule and (optionally) the retention rule.
   • Click Save.

   When started manually or on schedule, your backup plan will add incremental backups to the initial backup stored in the online storage.