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Full or incremental restore?

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Good Day everyone!

Firstly I am sorry if this is a rather daft question! and possibly one asked before.

I had a disaster with a drive and lost all the data, user error caused the issue. Anyway I have the drive backed up and I have created a full back up and there has been two incremental backups as well.  Now as I have lost all the data and in effect the drive is now blank, should I use the last incremental back up or the full back up as my restore?

Once again sorry for having to ask this question, but I am still learning about this software. 

Any help would be very welcome :)

Rob

0 Users found this helpful

Robert, welcome to these user forums.

There is no such thing as a daft question when your data is concerned.

Provided that all your backup files are on the same backup drive, i.e. your full backup plus the two incremental backup files that were based on the full backup, then you can select the most recent incremental backup to be restored and this will restore back everything else from the other files.

One key question is what type of backup do you have for this drive?  Is this a Disks & Partitions backup or is it a Files & Folders backup?  The real difference here depends on what you had on this drive, i.e. was this your Windows OS & Programs drive, in which case you really need the backup to have been of Disks & Partitions, whereas if this was a data drive (without any installed programs) then you would be OK with a Files & Folders backup.

Again, if this was a Windows OS drive and you are restoring a Disks & Partitions backup, then this should be done by booting from the Acronis bootable Rescue Media, and the rescue media in turn should be booted in the same way that your Windows OS would boot, i.e. if Windows uses a Legacy BIOS boot, the rescue media should use the same, or is Windows is UEFI, then the rescue media should be booted from a UEFI option for the device holding the boot media.