Full or incremental; how to tell?
TI 10 listed if the backup was a FULL or INCREMENTAL when choosing to restore a partition. TI 16 only gives a date and trime. Any way to tell what the backup was?
Dan, where are you looking at for your question please?
If you use Windows Explorer, then each backup image (.TIB) file has a suffix that indicates what type of backup created it, i.e. _full_ or _inc_ or _diff_ which makes it relatively easy to identify which is which.
If you use the ATIH 2016 main application and take one of the Recover options, then you get a drop-down list showing the dates that you can choose to recover (disks or files / folders) from, where the type of backup is controlled by the backup scheme that you choose when creating it, but which is not really relevant as any recovery will potentially use data taken from the whole backup version chain (i.e. the full plus incremental(s) or differential backup). This is because these backups may contain parts of the data being recovered.
To recover an incremental version chain, all of the incrementals in the chain are required or else the recovery will fail.
To recover a differential version chain, just the full backup plus one differential backup is required, as each differential contains all changes made after the full backup was created.
Steve, I think he's referening the GUI - during the recovery method, you can select the date you want to pick from, but it doesn't actually show the type of backup file being used for that recovery. I'm not sure it really makes a difference in the long run, but would still be nice to see if you wanted to opt for a full instead of an incremental or differential for some reason.
Bobbo, I understand and agree that the GUI doesn't show any more detail than the date for available backups, however knowing what type a particular backup is wouldn't make a difference in practise as you cannot restore from an individual backup in isolation from the version chain it is a part of.
The view that the GUI gives when a date is selected is a transparent view showing all the contents of the version chain and not just the contents of that particular incremental or differential image.
A comparison could be made with Windows System Restore points in terms of being able to pick a date / time to restore back to though the comparison stops there! With ATIH you can drill down to an individual file to restore or restore a full partition or disk from the same selection point. The key here is that the components of the data to be restored will come from both the selected (incremental or differential) backup image and from the initial full plus other incrementals that form the full version chain, assuming that some parts of that data remain unchanged from the time of the full backup.
Steve, I get it. I think some users may just like to know whether they are using a incremental vs a full - why, I guess "just because". For me, it really doesn't matter as I would be more inclined to restore by date as well. However, If I had two backups for the same date and one was full and one was incremental, I'd probably go for the full - just in case. I could always look them up in the backup name though. I think it's just because the older version did list the type of backup and now it doesn't that this was brought up.