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Differential or Incremental BUs

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I am running Acronis True Image 9 and want to use the differential or incremental feature to save some time for the BUs. This was OK when I used an internal hard drive for the archive, but when I switched to an external HD, the full BU file is in two pieces, even though I have the splitting setting on "automatic". I imagine that for some reason Acronis detects that the HD is connected through the USB port and decides to split the full BU. So now the question is when I do the differential or incremental BU, which of the 2 files do I choose-BU1 or BU2, both of which are parts of the full BU?

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Hello J Halpine,

Thank you very much for your post. Let me please clarify the situation for you.

To answer your first question about the backup file getting split into two parts after you started saving the image to your external HD. The most probable reason for that, is that your external drive has FAT32 file system. It does not support files larger then 4 GB and our software splits the file automatically into 4 GB pieces.

To answer your second question in relation to the first. Even if the backup file is split, our software will still detect this backup as a whole and will perform accordingly. There is no difference if you select BU1 or BU2 because they are both, like you said, parts of the full backup.

If you are not sure what type of backup to select, here is a brief summary of the difference between incremental or differential backups.

- If your objective is to reduce backup size and backup time, then the best strategy would be to create incremental backups. On the other hand, if you want to increase backup reliability, by not having to rely on a chain of incremental backups, then differential backups would be the best solution.

I can recommend to review the following articles for more details about:

Acronis True Image Splits Backup Archives to 4 GB Volumes When Backing Up to FAT32 Drives

- Difference between Incremental and Differential Backup

Please, let me know if there is anything else I can help you with.