TIH 2012 Question on Incremental Backups
Years ago in a question I asked in these forums, I mentioned that my backup job used incremental backup, meaning it made an initial full backup and then created incremental backups thereafter. I had 15 incremental files at the time. Someone replied that expect 15 incremental tib files to be in good order was flirting with disaster. I was expecting the product to be reliable and work with whatever backup scheme it allowed. Can anyone comment or offer real-world cautions that running a full backup once and then doing incremental for a few months is not a good idea? If it is not, then what is a good idea? I don't want to run a full backup every single time.


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Steve has answered the question already, I would only add that Acronis backups, stored locally (not in Acronis Cloud), are still just regular files, and like any other files can get damaged due to external factors. Although chances of such corruption are very low, having 15 incrementals multiplies them by 15.
There is no issue with Acronis software itself that would potentially pose any problem on having many incrementals. Any number of incrementals are handled equally correctly (if one may say so) as just 1 backup.
In terms of performance, restoring from a long chain of incrementals will be longer than from 1 full backup just because the program would be reading down the chain file-by-file till the full backup included.
Regards,
Slava
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