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Incremental backup to backup changed files only

What is an incremental backup?

An incremental backup is a backup of every file on a file system which has changed since the last backup, no matter the last backup is full backup or incremental backup.

The alternatives to an incremental backup are differential backup and full backup. Full backup often backs up all files on your partition or disk, no matter there is a change or not, it spends long time and much disk space. You don't need to do full backup if there is no major change happening to your system. While differential backup means to backup changed files since last full backup. So there is still some files you have backed up twice or even three times.

With comparison, incremental backup is the most space saving backup method, also, the fastest backup method. However, incremental backup also requires the longest time and the most tapes to restore.

When to do incremental backup?

Incremental backups should be used only in environments where backup time or backup storage media are extremely constrained. For most environments, a weekly full backup and a daily differential backup represent a better plan.

If you perform a full backup on Sunday along with incremental backups every night and the system crashes on Thursday, you will need to restore the full backup from Sunday along with the incremental backups from Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

In contrast, if you perform a full backup on Sunday and a differential every night, when the system crashes on Thursday you will only need to restore the full backup from Sunday and the differential backup from Wednesday.

Create incremental backup with backup software

Recommendation: EaseUS Todo Backup provides both file incremental/differential backup and disk/partition incremental/differential backup for home and business users. It's the world's first backup software providing so complete backup and recovery solutions. It enjoys an immediate popularity after its release. Now its download on cnet.com is over 93 milliom.

Download this software and follow the detailed steps to do incremental backup for your system or certain file and file folders. Refer to file or disk and partition incremental backup