Comments for What do I do with incremental backups when restoring?

Comment from Bob Z on 2011-04-26

2011-04-26T19:18:00Z

Your articles are always very well explained and written to be easily understood by novices while still being valuable to knowledgable readers. I am a fan of Acronis and have used it for a long time. However, I am still a little confused about incremental backups and have never created them. This may sound like a elementary question, but if you create a incremental backup, how is it differentiated from a full backup. Is it by naming?

Actually that's over here: What's an incremental backup?

27-Apr-2011

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A comment on: What do I do with incremental backups when restoring?

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Comment from Jim K. on 2010-07-09

2010-07-09T15:24:55Z

Excellent article. I learned a great deal about the various kinds of backups. I always knew that backing up was essential and did so. Then one day I had to reinstall Win Xp, reformat, and then bring back my data and applications. It was time consuming but worked very well and I was back in business. Using Acronis will give me additonal protection and make recovery much easier. Thank You for a great article.

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A comment on: What do I do with incremental backups when restoring?

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Comment from Michael Horowitz on 2009-10-12

2009-10-13T01:17:16Z

@Shirley: Image backups are taken to protect against both hardware and software failures. If you are only concerned abut hardware failures then you only need the most recent few backups - how many is a matter of opinion.

However, if you are concerned with software problems too, then you want to have some backups that are very old because you never know when a software problem first occurred. They can easily go without being noticed for a long time, especially malicious software that is out to steal information from you.

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A comment on: What do I do with incremental backups when restoring?

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Comment from chris on 2009-10-07

2009-10-07T09:28:30Z

personally, I prefer to use differential backups not incremental because you are only storing 1 full backup + 1 differential backup & the method referred to by Jeff Burns for periodic replacement of the full backup

That is a good compromise, but at the cost of disk space, if you're keeping those differentials. A differential is typically larger than an incremental.

07-Oct-2009

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Comment from Jeff Burns on 2009-10-06

2009-10-06T17:44:03Z

Leo,
You used Acronis as your example for backing up. While the example you gave was helpful in a general sense, it does create a lot of manual requirement to replace the full backup periodically and then erase old incremental backups.

Acronis allows for other options which, when applied, allow for backups to be fully automatic, with no manual intervention required. My view is that when it comes to backups, fully automatic is the goal. Anything less is an accident waiting to happen.

The features I am referring to are using incremental or differential as your backup and checking the box that says to create a new full backup every "x" days. If you then select the feature to remove the old archives, that should result in a fully automatic backup, yes?

Now, I'm going to go try it for myself (LOL)!

Yes, acronis does have many interesting additional options, and I do plan to expand on them in the future. My initial focus is not really Acronis, but using Acronis as an example to demonstrate common backup scenarios that might also apply to other tools. In other words I'm sticking with basic features.

07-Oct-2009

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Comment from Shirley on 2009-10-01

2009-10-01T16:33:36Z

Good Morning!

If I have the HD space available (1T external HD) and I make a full backup every day, can I safely delete all but the last 3?

Would all this writing, deleting and rewriting tend to wear out my HD sooner?

Thanks, Leo, for your great column!

You can keep as many, or as few, full backups as you like or feel the need for. They each stand alone, and represent the machine as of the date that the backup was taken. No, this won't have any appreciable additional wear on a a hard disk - many things we do are much more disk intensive.

02-Oct-2009

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A comment on: What do I do with incremental backups when restoring?

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