It's clear that exactly how incremental backups are used come restore time is ... unclear. I'll run through a conceptual example of how they're used that'll hopefully make things a little clearer.

Fortunately, you actually don't need to do anything all that different, or even think about it that much. Yes, you restore both, but it's all done in a single step.

In this video, part of our backing up series, we'll walk through restoring your entire machine from one of your backups.

In fact, we're going to restore it from a backup of a couple of days earlier, so that not only will we restore it, but we'll restore it to an earlier point in time.

While that's useful for various purposes, our next step will be to automate the process so we don't have to think about it. We'll use Acronis to schedule an automatic, daily backup.

Our first effort will be a simple full backup of the machine.