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Backup Scheme

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I am curious to know which backup scheme would use the least amount of space on a USB drive.  If you have it figured out, I'd appreciate it if I could "use" your settings.  Thank you in advance.

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It depends on what your objective is; there a different sorts of backups; whole PC, whole disk (and subset whole partition), files and folders. You can do full backup each time (which probably excluded as it takes a lot of space), you can do a differential backup (but it again takes up quite a bit of space as each differential backup includes all changes since the last full backup), and there is incremental backup (which backs up changes made since the last backup, either full or incremental). Incremental backup is likely to be most space efficient. There is also continuous backup option for files and folders. All these backup schemes can include cleanup options (not sure which ones are supported by ATI 2018 as I have not used it for about a year), but you can check out the available options in the ATI 2018 user guide.

As not everything changes at the same rate, you may wish to have separate backup tasks - I have separate backups for my system drive and for the partitions on other drives with data - I back-up photos and vidoes manually, but documents are backed up every day.

Ian

It really depends on the size of your destination disk and how long you want to retain backups. An incremental scheme is the most space saving. All backups start with a full. This is typically about 70% the size of the original data (mileage will vary) with compression. Incrementals will then just backup the changes since the last backup ran. Typically, this is small, but depends on how much has changed since then (like if you did a major Windows 10 update or added a large iTunes backup of an iPhone or something like that). 

As a personal recommendation, I like to do a daily backup with the incremental scheme and keep 6 incrementals. As an example, a full runs Monday and then a daily incremental Tuesday through Sunday. I retain 3 backup chains so this repeats three times, starting with a new full on Monday and more incrementals Tues-Sunday.  Then once the 3rd backup chain is complete and AFTER the 4th full completes, the oldest entire chain is deleted automatically.

I do this because it gives some history to recover from and fits well on my backup disk without worrying about running out of space. I also don't like letting incrementals go too long, as risk of corruption (in any backup program) increases the longer the backup chain gets and the longer it carries on. You could easily do this for 2 weeks safely in most cases (1 full + 13 incrementals), but fulls are the most reliable of any backup type, so I feel more comfortable having a weekly full, just in case.  It's a lot better to have to restore from a week ago, than a month if your incrementals somehow have been corrupted and you have to return to an older full as the only option.