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Backing up the data is the one of the most important tasks of every computer user. Because there are so many accidents can make the disaster to your data on computer. For example: hardware failures, human error and virus attacks. However, when making the backup, people will be puzzled by two problems - which type backup is appropriate and which incremental backup software can be chose.
Before backup your data, it is necessary to have a better understanding of the backup. There are actually three different types of backups: full backup, incremental backup, and differential backup.
Full backup which can be created by the tool within Windows backs up all the files in a partition or on a disk by copying all disk sectors with data. This is the simplest form of backup, but it is also the most time-consuming, space-intensive and the least flexible. Full backups are usually done relatively long intervals such as once a week; or after a major change of the data on the disk, such as an operating system upgrade or software install. However, during the intervals if something goes wrong, data is going to be lost. Meanwhile, most of the information on a computer changes very slowly or not at all. If you continue to do the full backup you will waste a lot of your drive space. For this reason, it makes sense only to back up the data that has changed.
Both differential and incremental backups save time and disk space by only backing up changed files. But they also have differences. A differential backup backs up only the files that changed since the last full backup. Though differential backups are quicker than full backups, yet the amount of data being backed up grows with each differential backup until the next full backup.
Incremental backups back up only the changed data, but they only back up the data that has changed since the last backup - a full or incremental backup.
Confused yet? Here the tables can shows the differences between these types from backup and restore.
Backup
| Day | Full backup | Incremental backup | Differential backup |
| 1 | Entire Drive | Entire Drive | Entire Drive |
| 2 | Entire Drive | Changes since day 1 | Changes since day 1 |
| 3 | Entire Drive | Changes since day 2 | Changes since day 1 |
Restore
| Restore to Day | Full backup | Incremental backup | Differential backup |
| 1 | Full backup from day 1 | Full backup from day 1 | Full backup from day 1 |
| 2 | Full backup from day 2 | Full backup from day 1 + day 2 incremental |
Full backup from day 1 + day 2 differential |
| 3 | Full backup from day 3 | Full backup from day 1 + day 2 incremental + day 3 incremental |
Full backup from day 1 + day 3 differential |
The characteristic of incremental backups is the shorter the time interval between backups, the less data to be backed up. In fact, with sophisticated backup software like EaseUS Todo Backup, the backups can be done every hour, or even more frequently. You can also compress the backup images to save your disk space to a large extent, which the Windows built-in tool could not do.
Here we introduce such incremental backup software - EaseUS Todo Backup. It is user-friendly with clear UI and simple clicks to complete the job.
Besides incremental backup, it also provides full file backup, differential backup, partition/disk backup and restore, partition backup, and backup schedule. EaseUS Todo Backup also offers other useful functions - automatically delete old images to save disk space according to your own time-setting and so on. EaseUS Todo Backup is proved to be a safe and stable incremental backup software.
See how to incremental backup your files under Windows 7/XP/Vista.
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