Incremental backups normally work by backing up files for which the archive attribute has been set. Unfortunately, this attribute is set by many programs when they open a file, even if they don't change it. Also, programs (including the operating system) often make 'housekeeping' changes that you don't necessarily need to keep. This can greatly increase the size of your incremental backups.
I try to back up only files that I intentionally change. It's quite difficult to do this, so I won't go into details, except to say that I find the program xxcopy, which is a much more powerful alternative to xcopy, very useful in this regard. As a result, my daily incremental backups are usually only a few megabytes in size, whereas Leo says, in another article, that his are a few gigabytes. (I don't doubt that he works harder than I do, but probably not that much harder :-).)
Periodically, I copy my incremental backups from the hard disk to DVDs, before deleting them from the hard disk, but retaining indexes to them on the hard disk. This way, I can get back any version of a file I've worked on (except, of course, ones that were overwritten during a single day's work).
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