Okay, as we are coming to a conclusion of our overview of types & styles of backup technologies, it would behoove us to touch on some terms that you will likely come across as you begin to use backup software.
They are Full (or Master), Differential, and Incremental. The first time you run across these terms you may become confused by some of the explanations (or lack thereof) within the backup software programs. But it’s really quite simple.
FULL BACKUP
A Full or Master backup is just that; it’s a full backup of everything that you have instructed the program to backup. For example, if you tell the program to create a Full backup of your My Documents folder, everything that is within that folder will be backed up… and I mean everything.
An understanding of the other two types (Differential & Incremental) are relevant to our grasping the concept of the Full backup.
DIFFERENTIAL BACKUP
A Differential backup is every new file and file that has been changed that has been added to the My Documents folder since the last FULL BACKUP. It is a much smaller backup. If you schedule your backup software to create a full backup on Monday and then each day of the week for 6 days after that you’ve instructed the software to create a Differential backup, you’ll only need the original Full backup plus the LAST DIFFERENTIAL backup to have a complete backup.
For example, let’s say that on Friday morning around 3 am your computer crashed and won’t run. You need your data, so you take your external hard drive that you’ve been using for backing up your files on. To have access to all of your My Documents folder you only need to restore the FULL backup plus the very last DIFFERENTIAL backup (from Thursday night) to have a complete copy of all your files.
INCREMENTAL BACKUP
AN Incremental backup is every new file and file that has been changed that has been added to the My Documents folder since the last INCREMENTAL BACKUP. It is the smallest of all backup types. If you schedule your backup software to create a full backup on Monday and then each day of the week for 6 days after that you’ve instructed the software to create an Incremental backup, you’ll need the original Full backup plus EACH OF THE LAST 6 INCREMENTAL BACKUP files to have a complete backup.
Again, for example, let’s say that on Friday morning around 3 am your computer crashed and won’t run. You need your data, so you take your external hard drive that you’ve been using for backing up your files on. To have access to all of your My Documents folder you need to restore the FULL backup plus each of the Incremental backups that have been created since the last Full Backup to have a complete copy of all your files.
While this type of backup, IMHO, is the quickest type of backup to perform each day, it’s also the most cumbersome to restore. If you only perform a Full Backup once a month you would need to also restore each of the Incremental backups, one by one, in order, to restore all of your data. (Personally, this just doesn’t suit my time crunched life)
So, consider well all of the options we’ve discussed and decide which type of backup and what frequency you would that fits your life best, but most important of all things is
BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP! You have no excuses now!
Until Next Time,
Happy Computing!