Incremental backups - TI 2009 vs. 2010
I was going through the user guide of TI2011 when I found a curious passage about incremental backups:
""Incremental" - These are most useful when you need frequent backups and the ability to roll back to
a specific point in time. Having created a full backup once, if you then create an incremental backup
each day of a month, you will get the same result as if you created full backups every day.
Incremental images are considerably smaller than full or differential images.
Such a backup scenario may consist of a weekly full system backup with intermediate, daily
backups that cover data that was changed since the LAST backup.
This scenario, while requiring less storage space and time for the daily backups, will require more work on your part to provide recovery after a system crash. In the event of a Thursday crash, you would have to recover the last FULL backup followed by the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday
incremental backups."
The highlighted part is what got my attention. Is the guide suggesting that, should I want to restore the last backup of a chain of incremental backups, I have to do the following:
- Restore the full backup
- Restore incremental backup 1 on top of the full backup
- Restore all following incremental backups 2-X one by one even after that
I was under the impression that should a system failure occur one can pick from any incremental backup and TI will restore the system to that point automatically, getting whatever data it needs. But all in one step.
Compare this to the same explanation about incremental backups in the user guide for True Image 2009:
"Incremental or Differential?
The difference is typically that in an incremental backup, only the files changed or added
since the last time the backup ran are added to the archive. With a differential backup, all
the files changed or added since the initial full backup, are added to the archive. Thus,
differential backups take longer to run than incremental backups. When restoring from an
incremental backup, the program must copy the entire initial backup and then step through
each of the previous backups to retrieve all the updated files. A differential backup, on the
other hand, can be restored more quickly because the software must copy only the original
backup and the most recent one."
Here the program is doing the work like I would expect, automatically and it is not implied that the user has to restore incremental backups by hand and quote: "[this] will require more work on your part".
So what is it now, did something change from TI2009 and TI2010 so that what the new guide says is actually true - is it just poorly written or I have misunderstood about everything on incremental backups. This one just leaves me scratching my head.

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I know for fact that with both v11 and v2010 if you performed a restore with thursday's incr then TI simply "knew" that it needed to start with the full and then apply monday, then tuesday and wednesday and finally apply the thursday file. Before TI started the restore it would check that it had all the files it needed, it would then do the restore. From your perspective your were not aware of all the intermediary steps being taken but rather from your perspective you simply were restoring your system as it looked on thursday.
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