Incremental backups have a bad reputation by many... your thoughts.
What are your opinions on creating and restoring from incremental backups.
I read many times that they are "unreliable" although no one seems to say why.
Other than the obvious, that all files must be present etc is there any real risk to this approach if the number of incrementals in a "tree" is kept at a sensible size.
I wonder whether many that say they have issues are perhaps inadvertantly corrupting or deleting odd files in the tree... I use a dedicated partiton that's accessed only by Acronis... I never put anything else on there.
So your thoughts... should the incremental approach be 100% trustworthy ?
Anyone experiences for and against ?
Thanks Mark,
I must admit I too have never had a problem with incrementals... it's just that I see so much bad press for them on forums and so on.
I suppose what I am really asking is "is the technology implementing the incremental" and specifically Aronis's technology guaranteed foolproof. Does it all come together... every time.
:) Even your reply says "if something goes wrong with one of the incrementals" as if that would never happens to a full or base image.
This is what everyone says, or implies, that the full image backups are always ,always perfect but incrementals... might be risky. If there is a bad sector on a HDD etc that's just as likely to corrupt a base image as an incremental.
Is the technology behind it all faultless ?
As you say though, I have never experienced any issues that I have been aware of.
Thanks.
I wouldn't say that anything is foolproof, especially a huge, compressed image file. If only one bit is in error then the outcome of a restore is unpredictable; that's why Acronis implements a checksum routine in their software. If one of the checksums calculates incorrectly then the software will declare the entire image file corrupt.
I think what people are saying on forum postings about incremental images is that if you have a full image and a number of incremental images, then to restore the last incremental, ALL of the files must be perfect and error-free. If even one of them has a bit error then the whole archive is declared corrupt. Perhaps they mean that a single file is less likely to have a bit in error than a bunch of files are.
That's interesting, thanks. I wasn't aware that if an error occured that there was any way you would know, until perhaps a file or program failed to operate as expected that is.
I tend to limit the tree size to 4 or 5 at most and the incrementals are never usually more than 1 to 2 gb in size.
That's for explaining it :)