Skip to main content

choose options

Thread needs solution
0 Users found this helpful

Flemming, welcome to these public User Forums.

How do I choose between incremental and differential backup?

The choice is made by clicking on Options for your backup task, then opening the Backup scheme page tab where you will see first the type of Backup scheme with a set of choices via a drop-down list, and below this, Backup method where again there is a drop-down list of the options available for your choice of Backup scheme.

The choice of using an incremental or differential backup scheme really depends on the user.

Incremental backups can be much faster to create and be smaller in size.  It is not recommended to create very large incremental backup chains as the risk of a single file in the chain becoming damaged or corrupted etc increases with longer chains and ALL files in an incremental chain are needed to recover from the backup.

Differential backups will become slower and larger in size the longer the time span since the initial Full backup for the chain was created, but in principle can be easier to manage when needing to recover as only the initial Full and one Differential file are needed.

The size of your destination backup drive will also be a factor in this choice.

Thanks Steve

I discovered in the meantime that I can only have incremental for cloud backup. (No choosing).

Should I create a new backup now and then and erase the old one?

I could stick with my NAS, but I like the cloud backup better.

Please advise

Cloud backups are a special case and there is no user choice of the backup method used - this will always show as being Incremental after the initial full upload has been done.

Cloud backups use a different method to how incrementals work for local backup destinations, including to NAS etc.

There should be no need to delete your Cloud backup unless there have been really significant changes to your source data for the task and you want to make a fresh start over.