Why Can Cloud Incremental Backups be deleted, without effecting the backup chain?
It's my understanding that cloud backups use an incremental strategy. Per the incremental strategy guide:
https://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/ATI2023/index.html#…
"Therefore, if you lose an incremental backup version or it becomes corrupted, all later incremental versions are unusable."
Why is this not true for cloud incremental backups? Is there some processing done, to revise the full backup with the deleted incremental backup's data?


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Thanks for posting a detailed answer. It sounds like cloud backups are really differential backups. Where new backups are always compared to the initial full backup.
Would you say that's a correct statment?
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Jacob, they are not differential or incremental in terms of how these work when used with local backup destinations.
Differential backups tend to grow in size with each new backup slice as this will always contain all changes since the initial full backup was created.
The key intention with cloud backups is to try to minimise the amount of data that needs to be uploaded once the initial full upload has been completed, hence the delta type approach and use of versioning to try to optimise the use of cloud storage while maintaining the integrity of the data being protected.
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