The right answer to this question can be a big money saver for your organization. If chosen according to your needs, it can eliminate downtime in case of data loss and substantially reduce your spendings on storage in case of the need to comply with data regulations. But to answer this question, you need to understand the key differences between each backup type. Here is the table to visualize the difference between those three backup types:.
A full backup is a total copy of every single file you allocate to be backed up as often as you set it up to be. Regardless of the changes in the old documents and the addition of new ones, a full backup will daily create a copy of:. The best way to back up files for most companies, regardless of their size, is to set up a full backup once or twice a week on Monday or Friday, complementing it with incremental or differential backups throughout the rest of the week.
An incremental backup is a more focused backup that usually follows the last backup. An incremental backup saves all the changes made since the previous backup. It helps to reduce the need for bandwidth and save storage space and backup time. The same goes for Thursday and Friday. A differential backup is similar to an incremental one but with one important difference.
An incremental backup is a resource-friendly alternative to full backup. Such a setup is designed only to back up data that has changed since the previous backup.
Therefore, it exclusively saves data that has been modified or added to the existing data volume. An administrator can arrange a full backup of the data set on Monday and then incremental backups between Tuesday and Friday.
Therefore, on Tuesday, it creates copies of any changes that have been made since Monday. Next, on Wednesday, it will back up any changes made since Tuesday, and so on. As a result, the weekly backup will consist of one full backup along with several smaller backup sets.
This method is efficient as it takes up less space on the system. Also, since the sets are smaller compared to the volume set, they take less time to back up.
The downside to using this method is that each incremental backup depends on the one before it. This means that any damage or loss on one of the sets may inflict incomplete data recovery. Having a larger number of backup sets also affects recovery time. A differential backup is similar to incremental as it relies on a full backup, followed by saving only the changes made on that source volume. However, it differs in the way these changes are saved.
While incremental backups save all changes made since the last backup, differential backups save changes made since the last full backup. With such a setup, the backup sets do not rely on each other, but rather on the full backup they stem from.
As they only consist of two backup sets, their recovery time is much better. This provides better data protection and a valid disaster recovery solution. In the following example, you see a five-day incremental backup plan. It starts with a full backup on Monday. The main difference between incremental and differential backups is how they save space and time by storing only changed files.
However, the effectiveness of incremental backups is very different from differential backups. Before we dive into the differences between Incremental and Differential backups let's review Full Backups. In its simplest form, a full backup is the starting point for both Incremental and Differential backup strategies. A full backup, of course, backs up all the data on a partition or disk by copying all disk sectors with data to the backup image file. During this time, if anything goes wrong, a lot of data can be lost.
An average partition or disk only contains a small number of changes per day, or even per week. Therefore, it makes sense only to backup data that has changed on a daily basis. This is the basis of smart backup strategies. Differential and incremental backups are different backup strategies with the same purpose: optimize backup time and space.
Differential backups only back up the files that have changed since the previous full backup, while incremental backups do the same, they back up the files that have changed since the previous incremental or full backup.
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