How does restoring differeintial or incremental files work?
I restored a Full backup, then went back to restore a differential. When I tried to restore the diffs in partitions, the operations included first deleting the partition I had just restored before adding the differential partition. When I tried it as a file restore, I got all kinds of errors as though the files instead of overwriting older files were adding them and exceeding the partition size.
What's going on? When you restore the Full backup, is it including the differentials?
A diff has the changed sectors since the last full. When you rstore it takes the full and then makes the diff changes too--if it didn't do this, you could have other changes on the disk that the backup couldn't account for or address. So basically you get the whole magilla when you pic the diff.
Why isn't that explained in any of the instructions I could find. It is counterintuitive to find that you should select the diff rather than the full. Now I am going to have to delete each of 7 partitions and "restore" them with a diff in the hopes I get all of my files back
Please include these directions in the future if you have one.
If you note the file date of the backup files, you'll see that the creation date of the full is not altered when you create subsequent diff. So changes to the source disk that occurred after the full was created would only be contained in a backup file created after the source disk was changed.
It's implied in the userguide, e.g., p. 92 of the guide for ati2010:
"
3. If you are going to recover files from an archive containing incremental backups, Acronis True Image Home will enable selecting one of the successive incremental backups by its creation date/time. Thus, you can roll back the file/folder state to a certain date.
To recover data from an incremental backup, you must have all the previous backup files and the initial full backup. If any of the successive backups are missing, recovery is not possible.
To recover data from a differential backup, you must have the initial full backup as well.
"
But it could be stated more plainly.
Grover, Thank you very much for that! YOU CERTAINLY DESERVE "FORUM HERO".
This is soooooooo CLEAR:
Storage folder
Full
Dif1
Dif2
Dif3
Dif4
if you select dif 4, the full plus dif 4 restored.
if you select dif 3, the full plus dif 3 restored.
If you select dif 2. the full plus dif 2 restored
If you select full, only the full restored.
Just found this 6 years later and would also like to thank Grover for this super clear explanation - which answers my question as I've just restored a folder from the latest dif and wondered why all files from the original FULL backup were also restored. I was especially pleased about this as it seems to take about 3-4 full minutes each time I clicked on a subfolder within the DIF backup file before it would display and allow me to move to the next subfolder or once arrived at the chosen folder, to select files and Ctrl-C to copy same.
Is this normal please to have such time delays?
My backup media is a brand new 2TB WD discovery external hard drive (not SSD) connecting with USB 3.1 in Win 10 Pro on Acronis True Image 2017, copying to an SSD on a brand new HP office PC.