Equivalent full/incremental backup schedule...

Currently, I run a full system backup weekly, along with nightly direct file copies by another program.

I'm trying to streamline things as much as possible, so as far as that goes, would the same thing be achieved if I were to create seven scheduled tasks (one full backup on, say, Monday morning at 5am, and incremental backups Tuesday-Sunday), and repeat the process weekly?

Is there any advantage to having one full backup a month along with incrementals each day along the way (or every other day, or every week, or whatever schedule)?

Thanks.

 

One concept that people often don't understand is "aged backups." That is a backup that is a week old, two weeks old, three... etc. The value is for the case where a failure is progressive or a virus is subtle in its destruction. It may take over a week to recognize that there is a problem. From the time of the start of the damage until it is recognized, all backups are in part damaged. You want to have one clean backup to restore as a starting point. How long would it take to recognize a problem? Problably less than one month, so you always want to keep at least one backup that is a month or more old.

There is a second rule that too many incrementals is a sure path to hell. If one incremental is damaged, none of the later incrementals can be restored.

So, your plan of no more than 6 incrementals is good as is your plan to make monthly backups. Just be sure that you schedule the monthlies so that there is always one month old backup that is not overwritten.

 

Hello veri,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Along with jmk94903 great advice I would recommend that you have a look at this thread and this post providing some examples of scheduled schemes.

Also as John noted incremental backup archives depend on previous incremental backup and the first incremental backup depends on the initial full backup, if any of successive incremental backups is missing, restoration is not possible. Thus, you could use differential backup archives, which do not depends on each other and depend on the initial full backup only.

Thank you.
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Aleksandr Isakov