Salta al contenuto principale

inc. backups, are they actually just as safe as

Thread needs solution

I get the sense incremental backups are considered less dependable than differentials. I understand that if in a series of inc. backups, one is defective, those that came after are lost- but, is this really a threat? Do people who mostly use incremental backups find that they seldom are defective? It certainly is less work for the computer to do incrementals so if they're dependable, that's what I'll do.

Also, I notice and see that others have complained that in this forum- you can't check off at the bottom to have replies sent to our email- until we continue the dialogue with another message. Is that by design or is that a bug in the forum structure?
Joe

0 Users found this helpful

The risk of incremental is as you understand it, that if one incremental is unreadable all subsequent incrementals are useless. But, AFAIK for most people incremental is safe.

You should not allow an incremental chain to become too long. An incremental restore depends upon every incremental in the chain being valid, including the original full. It's better to limit each chain to just a few incrementals, followed by a fresh full backup to start a new chain.

The safest, simplest type of backup is a full disk backup. If you have the disk space and time, it's worth doing some of these at least periodically. I only ever do full disk backups, though I often exclude some large file types to save space (those files are also backed up separately using Robocopy).

Tuttle, I have a 2T external USB drive so space is no problem. I think I may go with a custom scheme with a full backup, then maybe 3-4 differentials on a dialy basis, then start over- keeping 3-4 sets. My only concern about doing full disk backups is, not the time it would take, as that can be scheduled for late at night (I like the way ATI can turn on a hib. or sleeping system), but I should think the heavy activity on the drive might tend to wear it out sooner?

how often do you do your full backups?
Joe

My backup frequency varies, depending upon what I've been doing with my PC and how much new data I've created or changed. I probably average about three or four full backups per week, plus Robocopy file copying.