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TIH 2012 Question on Incremental Backups

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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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Joseph, the key concern with creating a large number of incremental backups is that by definition of how a recovery with incremental backups is performed, you would need to be 100% confident that each and every incremental backup since and including your last full backup image is good and passes verification.

If any single incremental backup in your backup chain goes bad, then all incrementals beyond that point are of no use and cannot be used to recover your system because the integrity of the whole backup has been compromised.

Acronis products do allow you to create incremental products 'forever' after creating your initial full backup, but that does not make it good practise to do so!  The product also provides other options for you to use that will allow for a new backup to be created after X number of incremental backups, with further options to say how many version chains of these full plus X incremental backups should be kept before any housekeeping is done to clean older versions out.

I would recommend that you take a look at the Best Practise Forum and in particular, look at the posts by Grover who has published some excellent guides on the different types of backup schemes and how these are used.

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