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Incremental backup

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Instructions state that if in a chain of incremental backups one incurs an error and restore is necessary the whole series of chains will be rendered unusable. I quote " Therefore, if you lose an incremental backup version or it becomes corrupted, all later incremental versions are unusable. Not so with differential backups. why is this then the preferred method. My system is not consistent and sometimes I have incremental backup erros. Would it not be preferable to do choose differential. The incremental was suggested by Acronis and they set up the backup method for me.

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An incremental backup chain is more vulnerable, since all older slices of the chain have to be in good shape and present when you restore a certain incremental backup slice. If one earlier slice becomes corrupted, then you can only restore up the slice prior to the corrupted one.
But it takes less space and less time to do an incremental backup since only changes compared with the last incremental backup are backed up, while all changes since the last full backup are backed up in a differential backup scheme. As a result, differential backup slices always grow bigger and bigger.
I always do incremental backups tasks, but I do often full backups in the chain so that the last full validated backup is never so old that I would never go back to it.

Whichever type you choose, I would suggest that you use "automatic cleanup" which will enable the program to perform automataic deletions of the old backups once your backup retention goal has been reached. This will force the creation of full backups on a regular basis. Here are a few example. User can set how many iinc or diff to keep before the next full backup; plus user can set how many chains to be stored (store X number ). Once the number of chains (store x number of chains) has been reached, the automatic deletiion becomes enabled,

GH12. Create Custom Incremental Backup Scheme. 6 Inc, Keep 4 chains.
GH13. Create Custom Differential Backup Scheme. 2 Diff, Keep 2 chains.
GH14. Custom Differential Backup Scheme . 6 Diff, Keep 4 chains. & folder
GH25. Understanding differences between Inc and Dif for Safety

I would also encourge you to review signature link 2 below--especially the first illustration which discusses the advantages of using a disk image backup rather than a partition image backup.